Just when the adventurer Marco Polo discovered the East, an obscure 13th-century Chinese priest became the first Asian to travel from Peking to Paris. His tale, best suited for an epic, a romance quest, or a political parable at the very least, is presented here in an unimaginative academic narrative by Rossabi (East Asian History/ Columbia Univ. and Queens College; Khubilai Khan, 1988). A priest of the Nestorian sect (a heretical Christian group that flourished in the Far East), Rabban Sauma and his young disciple, Makros, set out on a religious pilgrimage financed by Khubilai Khan to collect relics and visit religious sites in the Holy Land. Recovering from the perils of the deserts and mountains of South China, the two paused in Baghdad, where Makros was elected Patriarch of the Church. Nearly ten years later, the Ilkhanate of Persia sent Rabban to engage the help of the Pope and the kings of France and England in mounting a Crusade to drive the Egyptian Muslims out of the Holy Land. Although the mission failed—the kings were unable to assist, and the Pope was unwilling unless Eastern Christians and their rulers submitted to the Roman Church- -Rabban visited many churches, celebrated mass at the Vatican, and brought relics such as a scrap of Jesus' clothing back to Baghdad, where the Ilkhanate built him a church. Rabban died in 1317; his papers were discovered in 1887. Here, Rossabi, who laments Rabban's ``failure'' to record things, buries the material he does have in pedantry and irrelevant erudition: After numerous perils, a travel- weary Chinese priest arrives in Paris and delights in what he believes are 30,000 students—and the author lengthily disputes the calculation while he overlooks the wonder of it all. Rabban, who surely deserves to be known, remains an echo in search of a voice. (Three maps; 15 b&w illustrations—not seen.)
Pub Date: June 1, 1992
ISBN: 4-770-01650-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Kodansha
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1992
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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