A dense, often ponderous work from a deeply erudite scholar.
A revisionist study of the medieval era as representing a process of consolidation and transformation that eventually yielded the Renaissance.
Thanks to what German medieval scholar Fried calls the cultural prejudices of such Enlightenment thinkers as Immanuel Kant, the Middle Ages got a bad rap as a “childish and grotesque” era when, in reality, it was a period of enormous learning, democratization and secularization. The collapse of Rome spurred the migration of peoples, especially German-speaking, and the gradual consolidation in Europe of the Goths, Franks and Lombards. The meeting of the barbarians, who were devoted to the oral tradition, with the highly literate ancient culture of the Greeks and Romans, instigated “intensive learning processes” and the urge on the part of the invaders to emulate the civilization they had conquered. Fried sees a gradual progression toward a culture of reason, beginning with Boethius’ translation of Aristotle’s Organon and his own Consolation of Philosophy, moving through the highly educated Pope Gregory the Great (who ruled from 590 to 604) and his educational texts at the Byzantine court in Constantinople, and on to the emergence of Charlemagne and the Frankish kingdom via military conquest and Christian religious culture. Indeed, Charlemagne’s hunger for knowledge encouraged literacy and the copying of ancient, especially Latin, texts, further unifying the West. Fried tracks the importance of the Irish itinerant clergy in spreading faith and literacy (especially grammar), the inciting of the Crusades against the regrouping Islamic forces, and the first social contract forged between monarchy and aristocracy, ratified by Charles the Bald in the ninth century. The crackdown on heretical sects (e.g., the Cathars) during a period of intense papal schism helped along the evolution of the elaborate jurisprudential system. Overall, the Middle Ages brought freedom, Fried argues in this passionate but intensely scholarly book (translated from the German), and the desire to know the wider world.
A dense, often ponderous work from a deeply erudite scholar.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-0674055629
Page Count: 590
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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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