Engaging reading for specialists and general readers alike.
A distinguished ancient historian’s elegant study of the extraordinary women who helped lay the foundations of the early Christian church.
Most official historical writings about the early church have focused on how its male founders institutionalized biblical teachings and established hierarchies. As a result, the more humble, but no less important, contributions of women have largely been overshadowed. Cooper (Ancient History/Univ. of Manchester; The Fall of the Roman Household, 2008, etc.) offers a provocative glimpse into the lives of early Christian women by examining the legends and theological texts that, unlike the histories that were “preserved with institutional politics” in mind, served as tools for spiritual guidance. The earliest of these documents (from the first and second centuries) offer only fragmentary evidence of female contributions. Yet Cooper is able to weave compelling stories about such forgotten mothers of the church as Lydia, the “purple-seller” who helped the apostle Paul deliver his Christian message to people within the gentile community; the Galilean women Mary of Nazareth and Mary of Bethany, both of whom became the Gospel writer Luke’s symbols of enduring “commitment and loyalty” to Jesus; and the martyr Thecla, who defied a family imperative to marry so that she could spread the word of God. Later, third-century histories offer more detailed portraits of other historical women. Cooper suggests that these females, who were usually from the upper classes, used their wealth to found spiritual communities that would become models for the monasteries that would emerge as the church grew more institutionalized. In the fifth century, Byzantine Empress Pulcheria exerted enough influence on the church to help enshrine a Marian cult that would remain in place until the Ottoman conquest of Byzantium in 1453.
Engaging reading for specialists and general readers alike.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4683-0740-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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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