A revelatory biography, particularly for Americans whose history classes treat Eastern Europe as the far side of the world.
Convincing proposal that one of the most inept and eccentric European rulers in a turbulent age was the ultimate promoter of the arts and sciences in Western culture.
With good reason, British cultural historian Marshall (The Philosopher’s Stone, not reviewed, etc.) devotes considerable attention to the years that a teenaged Hapsburg prince spent at the court of his uncle, Phillip II of Spain. Future Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1552–1612) became fully “Spaniolated” (as one English emissary reported to Elizabeth I) in his courtly and personal manners, but watching Uncle Phillip barbecue heretics and wield the dreaded Inquisition as a weapon against his political foes led Rudolf to reject rigid Catholic intolerance of other beliefs. The court he later founded at Prague’s Hradcany Castle (to escape the irritating bustle of Vienna) established that city as an island of tolerance in sectarian-riven Europe. Shy, dyspeptic and melancholy to the point of clinical depression, Rudolf had a regrettable tendency to put off important political decisions, even his own marriage, which were boring in comparison to his preoccupation with alchemy, astrology and the sciences. But he assembled a fascinating collection of both authentic and charlatan brainpower under his patronage. Prague became a beacon to the likes of mathematician Johannes Kepler, who paid his bills doing astrological charts for nobility, and Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe; their collaboration produced the momentous Laws of Planetary Motion. Marshall suggests that his subject may have been the “greatest patron of the arts” who ever lived. Rudolf’s reward? A lonely death, and historians’ judgment that he was a weak, ineffectual ruler.
A revelatory biography, particularly for Americans whose history classes treat Eastern Europe as the far side of the world.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2006
ISBN: 0-8027-1551-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2006
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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