Warm portraits of two singular individuals.
An international romance.
Novelist and art historian Pears recounts the unlikely love story of Larissa Salmina (1931-2024), a Russian art curator, and British art historian Francis Haskell (1928-2000), who were Pears’ neighbors in Oxford. Drawing on conversations with Salmina and on Haskell’s 60 volumes of diaries, Pears conveys in rich detail the worlds from which the two emerged: Larissa’s in the repressive Soviet Union, Francis’ in class-conscious England. Their personalities were vastly different: Larissa was a rule-breaker, freewheeling and irreverent; Francis was self-doubting, lonely, and, from long years in one school and another, meticulous in following rules. Larissa feared for her Jewish friends as antisemitism raged; Francis hid his Jewish ancestry. Both were drawn to the arts. Larissa trained in art history at the Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, doing so well that she continued directly to a three-year postgraduate course at the Hermitage. In 1962, she was assigned to bring Soviet art to the Venice Biennale—works she lost when the freight car carrying them was decoupled from the rest of the train. Francis was in Venice at the time, studying art history on his own. Through a friend, they met and were instantly smitten. Although Larissa was married, she dived enthusiastically into an affair with Francis, breaking the terms of her visa to travel with him. For his part, he was amazed that anyone would fall in love with him and reveled in the newfound intimacy. Intricate machinations were involved to allow them to marry at Leningrad’s Palace of Marriages in 1965. Though Larissa, who never aspired to emigrate, was initially unhappy when they settled in England, her resilience and adaptability, and the couple’s shared spirit of adventure, sustained a long, loving marriage.
Warm portraits of two singular individuals.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2025
ISBN: 9781324073772
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
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
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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