Well-written and scholarly without being pedantic—an enlightening history of the broad influence the Vikings exerted in a...
The investigation into the origins of the 92 ivory chessmen discovered on the Isle of Lewis in the early 1800s provides a good avenue for Brown (Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths, 2012, etc.) to explore the rich tapestry of Icelandic and Viking history.
Iceland was a primary source of walrus ivory and produced more indigenous literature than any other language save Latin in the 11th and 12th centuries. The author tells of the intriguing “dragon scale,” which rates the historicity of the tales; the more dragons, trolls, ghosts, and walking dead, the less likely the accuracy of the saga. They were categorized as Family Sagas, Sagas of Ancient Times, Kings’ Sagas, and Contemporary Sagas, with the Family and Contemporary scoring low on the dragon scale. Reading the medieval sagas in the original Icelandic, Brown has extra insight into the life of Iceland’s golden age, and she finds frequent references to the culture of chess, royal gifts of chessmen, and actual chess matches. Chess was invented in India, taken to Persia by the mid-500s, and moved with Persian silver into the global trade routes. It was a king’s game of strategy and courtly love, initially with only one king, highly outnumbered. The author shows how different pieces evolved, as the vizier became first a weak queen, and then strong, and rooks become berserks, Odin’s warriors. Dating the delightfully quirky Lewis chessmen around 1200, Brown notes that their Romanesque style continued its popularity in Iceland. She is convincing in her assertion that Bishop Pall of Skalholt commissioned one of his four artisans, Margret the Adroit, to carve them. Photos of the chessmen enhance the narrative.
Well-written and scholarly without being pedantic—an enlightening history of the broad influence the Vikings exerted in a very short period.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-137-27937-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
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 Yorker staff 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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