by Leonie Frieda ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2013
Richly researched and deeply complex—at times sufficient to bemuse as much as inform.
A biographer delivers the scholarly yet very human story of some talented women who held surprising sway in the incredible clutter of city-states that composed Renaissance Italy.
Noting that Italy comprised some 250 individual states, Frieda (Catherine de Medici, 2005) focuses on three powerful families—Sforza, Este, Gonzaga—though others rise and fall throughout her tale, as well, principally the Borgias and the Medici. The stories (and families) are interconnected and extremely complex—witness the 10 pages of family trees preceding the text. (Assiduous readers will want to keep a finger among those pages.) The author follows the fortunes of such women as Caterina Sforza, her husband brutally murdered and mutilated, who flashed traitors in a crowd. Frieda also shows us the vilely corrupt papacy of the time. Greed, violence, sexual depravity, incompetence—all flourished. Throughout, the author wields a sharp rhetorical razor, too. Of Duchess Bona, she writes: “it would have been hard to find a stupider woman,” and Angela Borgia was a “brainless beauty.” Frieda does some restoration on the reputations of the Borgias, particularly Lucrezia, calling much of what had circulated at the time (and later) “a heap of fantastical stories and lies.” Among the most compelling of her accounts: the papacy of Rodrigo Borgia (Alexander VI) and the quest for power that consumed his son Cesare, who became a Spanish prisoner. Frieda also follows the international politics and military maneuvers of Italy, especially the incursions of France. Shifting alliances, deceptions and lies, the struggle for wealth and power—all are revealed in the stories of women who held (or manipulated) the reins of power when men were incompetent or away battling one another.
Richly researched and deeply complex—at times sufficient to bemuse as much as inform.Pub Date: April 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-0061563089
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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