A delightful excursion through the history, politics, and culture of the Eternal City, showing the continuity between Rome's turbulent history and its equally intriguing present. The glories and savageries of ancient republican and imperial Rome permeate journalist Sheridan's account: Reminders of Rome's ancient past are everywhere as Sheridan shows the influence of the symbolism and history of the Roman state on the universal Church and even on Mussolini's Italy. Sheridan deftly traces the history of the Latin language and literature from the ancient past until modern times, as it served as the Catholic Church's lingua franca until the 1960s. Sheridan writes not only of the native Romans, but of foreigners who, like himself, were attached in some way to the ancient city: Edward Gibbon, who conceived his great history amid the ruins of the Forum, and the Shelleys, who romanticized Rome until their young son died there of an illness exacerbated by the climate. Sheridan draws an arresting portrait of the complex Count Ciano, Mussolini's son-in-law, whose specious rise and tragic fall paralleled that of Fascist Italy. The author also devotes two chapters to the Catholic Church, providing a snapshot of the church during the sea change of Vatican II and following its progress through the increasingly conservative reigns of Paul VI and John Paul II. Finally, Sheridan discusses the scandal-ridden turmoil of current Italian politics. Tracing the fabled inefficiencies, corruption, and surprising stability of the modern Italian state to ancient Rome, Sheridan muses that ``its success depended upon the mechanism elaborated by Cicero and savaged by Juvenal: that is, the relationship between patron and client, the reciprocal use of favor, the courteous mutual understanding that oils every transaction.'' A pleasant journey through the past and present of Europe's greatest urbs.
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-13158-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
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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