by Joseph Luzzi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 5, 2024
A learned but accessibly written essay on a centerpiece of the European literary tradition and its continuing influence.
The making of a masterpiece.
Bard College literature scholar Luzzi posits that Dante was “an intensely experimental writer,” one reason that centuries later James Joyce would take so many cues from him. Dante was experimental, Luzzi continues, first because he did not write his Divine Comedy in Latin—a choice that limited his audience, since all literate Europeans would know Latin but almost certainly not the Tuscan dialect of Italian. Tuscan, in turn, and particularly the Tuscan spoken in Florence, provided Dante with a vigorous language that “could capture the intimate rhythms, cadences, and meanings of everyday speech and, by extension, the resonances and experiences of daily life.” Despite Dante’s enthusiasm for the language and ways of Florence, the city banished him in 1302, which, though infuriating, convinced Dante that he was on a mission from God to write a sacred poem that would explain the workings of heaven, purgatory, and hell. It took time for that word to spread; as Luzzi notes, “by the end of the 1300s, about eight hundred manuscripts of the Commedia were in circulation.” The introduction of movable type and translations into other languages made it a world classic, if long after Dante’s own lifetime. Perhaps ironically, Luzzi notes, one particularly close reader of Dante’s text was a “zealous Spanish cleric” working under the auspices of the Inquisition, who diligently crossed out passages that placed wayward popes and priests in hell and condemned “a Vatican that ‘fornicates’ with kings.” Perhaps it’s a sign of divine approval that the censor’s strikethroughs have faded away and Dante’s original text shines through.
A learned but accessibly written essay on a centerpiece of the European literary tradition and its continuing influence.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2024
ISBN: 9780691156774
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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