An elegant, pertinent study.
Journalist Shrady (Tilt: A Skewed History of the Tower of Pisa, 2003, etc.) takes a brief, brilliantly encapsulated look at the physical and spiritual damage wrought by a famous catastrophe.
The great earthquake that struck Lisbon midmorning on November 1, 1755, had far-reaching consequences. Nearly 100,000 people were killed as the city’s structures were leveled in minutes; fires raged, and tsunamis crashed on the shores. While the entire royal entourage of King José I, ensconced four miles away in Belém, miraculously escaped harm, the Mint was one of the only buildings that survived unscathed in Lisbon, leaving this major European port barely able to function. Most witnesses attributed the catastrophe to God’s vengeance on a sinful people, even though Lisboans were the most demonstrably pious of all Catholics. Shrady takes stock of a disaster second only to the destruction of Pompeii and pursues the city’s gradual regeneration thanks to the tireless work of Portugal’s secretary of state, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, who immediately mobilized the troops, urged the royal family not to flee, suppressed lawlessness and made food available. Enlightened in his ideas, Carvalho attempted to silence the sermons of woe by the powerful Jesuit Gabriel Malagrida, among others, and encouraged scientifically minded thinkers to look into the earthquake’s natural causes. Faced with the task of rebuilding, Carvalho embraced the Enlightenment’s new spirit of urban planning, endorsing plans that reflected “the kind of social and economic change that was necessary to rouse Lisbon, and Portugal, from centuries-old slumber.” His reforms ranged from the abolition of slavery to the repeal of institutional discrimination against Jews, though his power was eclipsed after the king’s death in 1777. To provide context for Carvalho’s achievements, Shrady offers an elegant précis of Portuguese history and dwells in one affectionate digression on Voltaire’s depiction of the earthquake in Candide and the Protestants’ relish in blaming the Catholic Church.
An elegant, pertinent study.Pub Date: April 7, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-670-01851-2
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
HISTORY | NATURE | MODERN | GENERAL HISTORY
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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