In 1827, a giraffe sailed from Egypt to Marseille. It then walked to Paris. It was France’s first giraffe, and this is Allin’s first book. Both events are worthy of note, trailing surprise and pleasure in their wake. Allin tells the story of Zarafa, a giraffe sent to France’s King Charles X by the viceroy of Egypt, Muhammad Ali. Ali had recently invaded Greece, and Europe was angry at the move; Zarafa was meant to insinuate Ali into the king’s favor by gracing the royal menagerie with an exotic. This all came about from a combination of circumstance and personality, both of which Allin ably delineates: the post-Napoleonic Egyptomania that gripped France; the cultured pirate Bernardino Drovetti, French consul general to Egypt, who trafficked in exotic animals and mummies; Ali himself, erstwhile Albanian mercenary, Francophile, up-from-nothing barbarian who consolidated his power from Nubia to Syria, and under whose reign “Egypt went from the Stone Age to the Enlightenment”; Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, scientific wunderkind of the Institut de France. And, of course, there is the giraffe (Zarafa is the Arabic-derived name Allin gives the beast): her capture as a calf, her journey “via camel, Nile felucca, seagoing brigantine, and her own four legs” to Paris and celebrity, a monumental addition to the national cabinet de curiositiÇs, an instant infatuation that generated vaudeville skits, hair styles, and the naming of a form of influenza in her honor. In the process, Allin gives readers glimpses of Napoleon’s corps de savants; histories of Alexandria, Messina, the Ptolemies; a fine caricature of European bureaucratic maneuvering in the early 19th century; and, not least, a superb description of the sea’s colors off Alexandria (Allin traced the route). Allin shares a talent seen in two other recent Walker books, Dava Sobel’s Longitude and James deKay’s Monitor: the ability to make an obscure subject incandescent through crisp storytelling and a felicitous handling of arcane details. (illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Aug. 7, 1998
ISBN: 0-8027-1339-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1998
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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