A grand entertainment for literary sleuths.
Poor Christopher Marlowe, dead in a barroom brawl, not yet 30. Things were tough in 1593. But what if Kit didn’t really die?
A writer gets involved in political intrigue and disappears, but publishes brilliant work in the name of a far less talented writer. It goes well until the patsy has the audacity to venture rewrites, and then fresh scripts, and sets out on his own career. It’s the plot of Martin Ritt’s 1976 movie The Front, but the premise has antecedents in the life of Marlowe, at least as Amsterdam-based travel-writer Bolt interprets it. For Marlowe—alias Kit Marlin, alias Tim Larkin—was, as Bolt writes in this lively, speculative biography of the great English playwright, a secret agent in the service of Francis Walsingham, the anti-Catholic spymaster and enforcer for Elizabeth I. Somewhere along the way, Marlowe drifted into heresy himself. To make things worse, on Walsingham’s death and without his protection, he stumbled on a plot on the part of Sir Robert Cecil to gain power; in response, Cecil ordered Marlowe’s assassination, for “any ripples his removal caused could be easily managed.” Bolt’s plot, already worthy of Robert Ludlum, becomes more complicated: He supposes that Marlowe’s friends faked his murder before Cecil could make it real. Marlowe spent the next few years wandering about Catholic Europe and visiting the likes of Cervantes while sending home plays about Veronese teenagers and mad kings, all full of anagrams and acrostics and hidden clues as to the identity of their true author. But Marlowe got no credit for his resoundingly popular plays: Instead, the glory went to one William Shakespeare, whom Marlowe recruited to be his front. And Shakespeare, Bolt avers, was by far the lesser author. Marlowe, who knew his Continental literature and his classics, spoke many languages and was well-traveled—all attainments that Shakespeare, according to his contemporaries, did not have.
A grand entertainment for literary sleuths.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-59691-020-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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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