paper 0-8101-6051-X A jewel of a memoir. Born in 1911, Guglielmo Petroni was only eleven when fascism came to power in Italy. This work was written during the final days of WWII and published in the first issue of the Italian Communist Party’s literary journal Botteghe Oscure (yes, in Italy, the political parties have literary journals) in 1948. Since 1949 it is has been almost continuously in print, for reasons English readers will now be able to discover for themselves. A writer, journalist, and poet in Florence and Rome during the fascist dictatorship, Petroni paints a finely shaded psychological portrait of the conformity and oppression of those years. Most of the book, though, is devoted to the month he spent in various fascist and nazi prisons in Rome. After Italy’s armistice with the Allies on 8 September 1943, Petroni had joined the Resistance and was captured in May 1944. Italians have long been familiar with the places Petroni “visited,” such as the infamous Regina Coeli prison and the notorious Via Tasso offices of the SS where he, and many other partisans, were tortured and some eventually executed. Petroni too was scheduled for execution, but the Allied liberation of Rome on 4 June 1944 saved his life. Memory, nostalgia, and a burning desire for understanding come together in some compelling passages here. Petroni offers no apocalyptic solutions, neither political nor religious, neither Christian nor Marxist. His is a deceptively simple account, but one that is striking and profound. His readers will immediately recognize a writing style similar to Primo Levi’s: an avoidance of rhetoric and a refusal to accept the role of omniscient narrator: “Humans find a moral solution only by seeking . . . the universal truths bearing the marks of the tragedies that surround them.” In a postscript written fifteen years after the end of the war, Petroni compares the world to a prison “whose dimensions do not change the impossibility of overstepping the barriers of life.” And yet, in his obscure bitterness there is still a faint hope in human solidarity. A small masterpiece.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8101-6050-1
Page Count: 139
Publisher: Northwestern Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999
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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