Marshall finds a unique niche in a year replete with wider biographies of Luther and histories of the early Reformation.
A concise history of the act that started the Protestant Reformation.
Marshall (History/Univ. of Warwick; Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation, 2017, etc.) provides an intriguing historical survey of Martin Luther’s act of posting a list of 95 theses on the Wittenberg Castle Church door on Oct. 31, 1517. This moment in time is often seen as the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, which rocked European politics and culture and changed the face of Christianity from then on. However, it may never have happened at all, or if it did, it was an unremarkable moment akin to tacking a notice on a public bulletin board. Nevertheless, the posting of the theses has taken on a life of its own as a symbol and as a historical marker, commemorated in art and celebrated on the calendar. Marshall explores the history of this phenomenon through the past five centuries. He begins with a retelling of the story behind the theses and then examines the uneven steps by which they eventually came to represent the beginning of a movement. In looking at the year 1617, the author notes that the commemoration of the Reformation was modernity’s first real celebration of a centenary, a trend that would become commonplace over the ensuing centuries. Furthermore, the 150th anniversary birthed the idea of a “Reformation Day,” now a common part of the Lutheran calendar. By 1817, Luther was being reimagined “as the eternal symbol of German freedom and nationhood.” Yet by 1917, that same Germany would be at war with the world, and the meaning behind Luther and his signature day would again have profound, albeit differing, significance in Europe and beyond. Throughout, the author offers interesting reading for both scholars of the Reformation and history buffs in general.
Marshall finds a unique niche in a year replete with wider biographies of Luther and histories of the early Reformation.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-19-968201-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
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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