It takes considerable courage and incontrovertible evidence to propose, as Bossy (History/Univ. of York) does, that Giordano Bruno, an Italian ``national saint'' burned at the stake in 1600 for defying the Pope, spent three years (1583-86) as an anti- Catholic spy at the pro-papal French Embassy in London. According to Bossy, Bruno—an excommunicated Neapolitan friar who sometimes used the alias of a priest named Henry Fagot—served the religious needs of the ambassador's family and of the English Catholic sympathizers who found refuge at the embassy, birthplace of the conspiracy to assassinate Elizabeth I and release Mary, Queen of Scots, imprisoned for the past 19 years. As Fagot, Bruno claimed that he learned of the plot during confession, leading to the arrest, torture, and ultimately the execution of several English noblemen and contributing to the decision to execute Mary as well. If this story is true, then Bruno was not just a spy but a fraud, impersonating a priest, and a traitor, betraying the French king and the ambassador, and all of this for rather vague reasons—neither for money nor power but to undermine the credibility of the papacy and because it appealed to his taste for practical jokes. From this story, it is difficult to tell how Bruno acquired his reputation for brilliance, charm, wit, courage, and integrity, for Bossy depicts a ``smart operator'' and a ``dishonorable'' one, argumentative, abrasive, the author of ``soporific'' dialogues whose speculations on science and cosmology were eccentric and unoriginal. Regrettably, the significance of Bruno and even of the conspiracy is lost in Bossy's presentation- -obscure, convoluted, turgid, weighted with chronologies, false clues, obfuscation, irrelevant letters, artificially designed mysteries—such as a whole chapter arguing for the ``coincidence'' of Fagot and Bruno's similarities when Bossy is about to reveal that they are the same man. However correct his facts, however indisputable his conclusions, Bossy compromises them by his melodramatic presentation—which is probably more suitable to fiction. A bewildering and frustrating read. (Illustrations.)
Pub Date: Nov. 13, 1991
ISBN: 0-300-04993-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1991
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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