A wise, eye-opening interdisciplinary view of an era that “featured numerous exciting conceptions of the human form.”
An in-depth look at the medieval conception of the human body.
Some readers may be put off initially by this head-to-toe dissection of the body, but they should press on to encounter a delightful mixture of thought, experiment, discovery, and religion. In his debut book, Hartnell (Art History/Univ. of East Anglia, Norwich) uses his knowledge of art history and the drawings and paintings that showed then-current thinking on organs, bones, blood, and the body in general. The key to understanding this era is the interaction among diverse cultures. “A shared classical heritage undeniably binds together the medieval history of the regions on all sides of the Mediterranean,” writes the author, “separating them somewhat from the busy parallel stories of the Far East, India, China, sub-Saharan Africa or the pre-Columbian Americas. Three principal inheritors of the legacy of Rome [Byzantium, Western and Central Europe, and the Islamic world] come to the fore, each representing a different texture of the medieval bodies that I want to try to trace.” With the exception of the Crusades, the Muslim kingdoms thrived through tolerance for other religions and cultures, enabling trade and, most importantly, the sharing of ideas. For Hartnell, two of the most interesting illustrations are the “Hebrew Bloodletting Figure” and the “German Wound Man.” The bloodletting figure provided a map of the most efficacious spots to bleed a patient while the Wound Man offered cures for punctures and other wounds as well as instructions on the placement of a styptic. Among other intriguing topics, the author discusses a 10th-century Arabic author who provided dental advice and instructions on suturing wounds. As Hartnell shows, medieval conceptions of medicine and the body fluctuated between tangible and fantastic and often conflated thoughts, philosophy, and religion with artistic imagination. When we consider that observational dissections didn’t regularly take place until the 1500s, the scope of the work of these cultures is quite impressive.
A wise, eye-opening interdisciplinary view of an era that “featured numerous exciting conceptions of the human form.”Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-324-00216-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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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