A fresh, accessible take on a rich history; ideal reading for anyone planning a trip to Spain.
The British-born Madrid correspondent for the Guardian offers an enthusiastic history of the country he has called home for 20 years.
A “recently naturalized ‘new’ Spaniard,” Tremlett employs as a unifying theme Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno’s “four winds” theory to illustrate the fertile mixing of diverse peoples who have swept across the Iberian Peninsula for centuries. As long as those winds have been allowed to blow through—Romans, Visigoths, Moors, and beyond—the country has flourished. However, when the winds have been stifled—e.g., by Isabella and Ferdinand when they expelled the Moors and instigated the Inquisition, or during Franco’s years of totalitarian rule—the country has “withered.” Tremlett is concise yet thorough in his historical journey, which he wisely begins by discussing Spain’s geography. The Iberian Peninsula’s proximity to the coast of Africa and to significant trade hubs in the Mediterranean has dictated much of its geopolitics over the centuries, and the tug of war between the Christian north and Muslim south has resulted in some of Spain’s most treasured cultural legacies. “The always porous frontier across which Muslims and Christians had traded and raided for centuries allowed for the import of cultural riches,” writes the author. “Toledo was awash with ancient manuscripts of the kind that had filled the magnificent libraries of Córdoba, many of which had been smuggled north before or after the city was twice sacked by Berbers in the four years after 1009.” During the early years of the Age of Exploration, Spain became one of the primary European traffickers of enslaved people from the African continent. Following the nation’s golden age of arts and culture, which Tremlett explores in appealing detail, it experienced a protracted period of absolutism, revolution, and civil unrest, culminating in Franco’s dictatorship. The author then brings us up the present, which includes ongoing insurgencies in Catalonia and the Basque Country. The many bright photos are a welcome bonus to the well-researched narrative.
A fresh, accessible take on a rich history; ideal reading for anyone planning a trip to Spain.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63973-057-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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