A welcome history of reading as a story of faith in the word and the self.
How “the history of books, reading, and communication can illuminate our current dilemmas.”
Halldorf, a Swedish scholar, offers a history of reading in the West, but his book is really about the place of literacy in the history of faith. Beginning with the preaching of Jesus, he traces how religious authority moved from the moment of oral performance to the immutability of the written word. The scrolls of ancient Rome gave way to the codex, the bound book as we know it today, largely through the influence of Christian scripture. It was the monks, we then learn, who effectively saved civilization in the Middle Ages. Reading aloud, the standard social practice for centuries, was followed by reading silently during the early Modern period, enabling a new intimacy with texts and a new sense of human interiority. The Reformation came through the new medium of print. Translating the Bible into European vernaculars and empowering individual Christians to find a meaning in the text worked together to change radically relationships between the word of God and words of men. Today, digital technology has increasingly replaced hard print as the medium of communication. Halldorf concludes with an argument for “resonant reading”—engaging privately with a text, taking pleasure, opening the self to the imaginary, and fostering the closest thing we have, in this secular world, to prayer. “To enjoy beauty, we need to be attentive.” Originally published in Swedish in 2023, the book covers ground familiar to scholars from the work of Robert Darnton, Alberto Manguel, Anthony Grafton, and a host of book historians. For those new to the subject, though, it is a lucid introduction to reading with the spirit as well as with the eye.
A welcome history of reading as a story of faith in the word and the self.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781479840731
Page Count: 320
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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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