An enthusiastic appreciation of a unique, increasingly vulnerable city.
Venice does not lack admirers, but this is an inventive addition to a crowded genre.
An anthropologist at Cornell, Small emphasizes the city’s social structure as she describes “how one small place had an outsized influence on the development of Western culture.” Venice lovers already familiar with plaudits by other travelers and historians will enjoy this different perspective. At its peak, historical Venice was far from the largest city in Italy, let alone Europe. A republic for more than 1,000 years, its government was an oligarchy with a weak leader (duke or “doge”) and an economy based on trade. Throughout history, an obsession with making money, although unattractive in an individual, was a feature of the most liberal societies. “Cutthroat” competition among Venice’s businessmen was rarely taken literally, which was not the case in other nations, where disagreements in religion or politics routinely ended in bloodshed. A center of European culture and science during the Renaissance, Venice paid little attention to papal strictures. Galileo’s troubles with religious authorities took place after he left. Taking advantage of the first copyright laws, Venetians established great publishing houses and invented the paperback, most punctuation marks, and the thesaurus. Small gives its heralded arts a nod but focuses mostly on its spectacular stream of new ideas, techniques, and inventions. To facilitate business, Venetians invented double-entry bookkeeping, national banks, government bonds, and reliable currency. Modern experimental medicine began at the University of Padua, then part of Venice. Other firsts include patent laws, eyeglasses, a department of health, public defenders, and national surveys and maps. Most readers know that rising seas are a critical danger, but Small also points out that Venice may be the first city destroyed by tourism. Its shrinking population of about 50,000 hosts 22 million visitors per year, who pack its streets and canals more densely than Disneyland in an area not much bigger. The book includes a “chronology of Venetian inventions.”
An enthusiastic appreciation of a unique, increasingly vulnerable city.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64313-538-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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