Sly, witty, and delightful—a glorious Shakespearean romp.
Knock, knock. Who’s there? Hamlet.
To help celebrate the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, Dromgoole (Will & Me: How Shakespeare Took Over My Life, 2006, etc.), the artistic director of the Globe Theatre in London, came up with a fantastical idea: to perform Hamlet in all 204 countries in the world. “With a few detours to avoid war and epidemics,” they did, settling on 197 countries—no North Korea, of course, and for some reason, France passed. This is Dromgoole’s thoroughly enjoyable and charming story of how they did it: “Unprecedented chutzpah and a healthy quantum of stupidity helped launch the mission.” They picked Hamlet because, in the author’s estimation, it is “a unique play in the canon of world drama” and possibly “the strangest and most beautiful play ever written.” Dromgoole tells several stories. Besides detailing the two-year tour itself, it’s a story of the play, its themes and language, famous past players, and how it has been performed and received over the years. He describes how the 12 original players (plus a few others here and there) and four stage managers were chosen. The tour kicked off in London in April 2014 with two performances. Then it was off to the Netherlands. By mid-May, they had 10 performances under their collective belts. In early August in Mexico City, the company was “crumbling like a castle under bombardment.” Players were ill, and the city was “decked out in full Day of the Dead splendor.” Scenes were omitted, but the play must go on. On the island of Palau, the queen demanded a personal fee of $1,500 to use the performance hall. In Cambodia, the play’s poster featured Hamlet holding Yorrick’s skull; the irony was palpable. In Saudi Arabia, it was the “first time that Shakespeare [was] performed with men and women on the stage.” The final performance took place at the Globe in April 2016.
Sly, witty, and delightful—a glorious Shakespearean romp.Pub Date: April 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2562-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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