Fascinating material related with gusto: an unbeatable combination.
The life and times of the Syrian adventurer whose stories filled four volumes of The Thousand and One Nights, but who remained uncredited for centuries.
When Hanna Diab rolled into Paris in 1709 in the company of a freebooting antiquities collector who had hired the restless teenager in Aleppo, scholar Antoine Galland had already published seven volumes of his (very liberal) translations from an incomplete Arabic text; they had been wildly successful, but he was out of material. Luckily for him, Diab had plenty of stories, of which Aladdin became the most famous. As journalist/documentarian Teller points out, no manuscript source has ever been found for this popular tale of a boy, a magic lamp, and a genie, and it was quite likely Diab’s invention, inspired by an incident in his own life as well as multiple tales he had heard growing up in a culture steeped in oral storytelling traditions. Teller vividly recreates this culture, aided by atmospheric period illustrations scattered through the text. He provides sharp thumbnail sketches of the large cast of characters associated with Diab, the Nights in its many incarnations, and the rediscovery of his contributions to it. Galland had hustled the boy out of Paris to maintain the fiction that his translation of the Nights was “a coherent anthology that had been transmitted intact from ancient times.” Only after the memoir of his youth that Diab dictated at age 75 surfaced in the Vatican Library did his contributions become known, and that took nearly a hundred years. Teller traces the memoir’s tortuous path from Syria to publication in Chapter 8, which displays the author’s characteristic blend of impressive research worn lightly and conveyed in punchy prose. This ensures that while his text sometimes rambles, it always entertains.
Fascinating material related with gusto: an unbeatable combination.Pub Date: tomorrow
ISBN: 9781771967686
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2026
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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