An engrossing story, sadly contorted in the telling.
Memoirist Simeti (On Persephone’s Island, 1986, etc.) tells the story of Constance d’Hauteville, whose marriage linked the medieval Norman kingdom of Sicily with the Holy Roman Empire.
In 1186, the 32-year-old Constance, heir to the throne of Sicily, married Henry, rock-ribbed son of the dashing Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and ten years her junior. When her half-brother William II died childless three years later and the succession went to another male relative, Henry, now emperor, determined to enforce Constance’s claim and take Sicily for himself. It took two tries, and in 1194, en route to Sicily the second time, the 40-year-old empress discovered to everyone’s astonishment that she was pregnant. The child she bore became Frederick II, one of the most powerful and controversial figures of the Middle Ages. Part travelogue, part history, Taylor’s narrative moves between Constance's final journey and her own trip 800 years later along the same (reconstructed) route. Simeti, an American who has lived in Sicily for many years, offers lively descriptions of important Italian sites and buildings, illuminating background on medieval people and practices, and some reflections on the continuities and discontinuities over time of various human experiences: travel, selfhood, childbirth, and, naturally, expatriation. Articulate and well-grounded in medieval studies, the author is a self-styled “incautious amateur,” filling gaps in the record with imaginative conjecture. Unfortunately, Simeti also invests her informed, intelligent reconstructions with the trappings of self-indulgent fantasy; she needlessly invents names for unattested figures, dramatizes undocumented relationships, and smugly apologizes for doing so at every opportunity. Even worse, Simeti uses Constance’s 1194 itinerary as an organizing principle for a story that begins more than 30 years earlier. (A chronology is provided—too late—at the end.) For the general reader unfamiliar with the major events of the late-12th century, this episodic approach would be confusing in any case; combined with Simeti's modern-day anecdotes and detours, it verges on incoherence.
An engrossing story, sadly contorted in the telling.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-27878-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2001
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 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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