An entertaining ramble through a golden age of violin-playing and violin-faking.
A rollicking historical study that tackles the murky careers of antique violins and the raucous culture of 19th-century virtuosos.
Gaul, a violinist and trustee of the National Music Museum in South Dakota, explores the provenance of two 18th-century Cremonese instruments: the “Messiah” Stradivarius, owned by Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum; and a violin made by luthier Giuseppi Guarneri, now displayed in Genoa’s town hall. The latter was once owned by legendary virtuoso Niccoló Paganini, who dubbed it Il Cannone for its powerful sound. Both violins are of questionable authenticity because of their passage through the workshop of Parisian luthier and violin dealer Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume, who was known for making near-perfect copies of Cremonese originals. Vuillaume did repairs on Il Cannone for Paganini in 1833, bought the Messiah himself in 1855, and copied both. Gaul investigates the possibility that a copy was passed off as the original and even exceeded it in quality. The author also dives deeply into old-school violin-making details, from the design of bows to specific techniques to make brand-new violins look very old. Along the way, he steeps readers in the antics of superstar romantic violinists, especially the larger-than-life Paganini; he spotlights the maestro’s astonishing performances, his tempestuous love affairs, his disturbing syphilis symptoms, and his devilish reputation. The book is a meandering jaunt, full of far-flung digressions on such topics as Napoleon Bonaparte’s mistress and the era’s anxiety that female piano players attracted immoral men; these sometimes lose the thread of the overarching mystery but are wonderfully intriguing in their own rights. Gaul relates all of this in elegant, evocative prose: “When it is ill—when it is being pried open with a knife—it makes sickening cracking sounds as its bones are separated,” he writes of Vuillaume’s disassembly of Il Cannone. “Paganini was exquisitely sensitive to sound, and it was a torment to hear his own violin put under the knife.” Lovers of classical music and forensic detective stories will eat it up.
An entertaining ramble through a golden age of violin-playing and violin-faking.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-03-910819-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 Yorkerstaff 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
Welcome reading for anyone concerned with real rigged elections.
Tired of the lies about the 2020 election? Buckle up: Trump is just warming up, and his allies may be getting craftier.
“This is not a book about January 6, 2021. It is a book about January 6, 2025,” write legal scholars Lessig and Seligman. We are lucky, Lessig suggests, that John Eastman and his fellow plotters “picked the dumbest possible strategy for pursuing what we feared they were trying to accomplish”: namely, trying to convince Mike Pence that he had the constitutional authority to refuse to certify the results by which Joe Biden won the presidency. One might argue that the second dumbest strategy was to send an army of fascist goons to the Capitol to try to enforce Eastman’s argument. However, Lessig and Seligman argue, there are holes in the Constitution wide enough to drive a burning dumpster through, and they might allow an interested party to falsely claim victory in a closely contested race and win the election. The authors presume that any such gaming-the-system effort will come from MAGA Republicans, though they add that a Democrat could easily use the same tactics. Readers may need a law degree to follow some of the arguments, but others are quite accessible. One argument that Lessig has been mounting for some time, for instance, is that the winner-take-all method employed by most states for electoral votes needs to be replaced with an apportionment system so that the Electoral College count will align with the popular vote. On that score, the authors warn, the prospect of rogue electors—or more, rogue governors who control those electors—is very real, and numerous other threats could enable someone smarter than the last bunch to mount “a cataclysmic attack on our democracy.”
Welcome reading for anyone concerned with real rigged elections.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9780300270792
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
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