by Scott Huler ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2008
Part travelogue, part lit-crit, part self-discovery, part paean to home—and all in all, a most fantastic voyage.
Responding to The Odyssey’s siren song, NPR contributor Huler (Defining the Wind: The Beaufort Scale, and How a Nineteenth-Century Admiral Turned Science into Poetry, 2004, etc.) retraces that ancient journey around the Mediterranean.
Fierce curiosity is the sharpest tool in this writer’s kit, and its keen edge is evident everywhere here. Indeed, some subjects exert a Charybdis-like pull on Huler, who can quickly fall into a vortex of all-consuming research. But his account of peregrinations in pursuit of Odyssean sites is generally entertaining and often illuminating. Most chapters feature a brief summary of a particular episode in the epic (fortunately, not always delivered in the same fashion) and then an account of his endeavors to locate its setting. Trying to catch trains and ferries, finding food and lodging, even communicating could sometimes be frustrating, but then a serendipitous travel experience—like the little boat that took him and him alone to the Sirens’ islands—made it all worthwhile. Huler isn’t embarrassed to admit to spending time in the land of the Lotus-eaters looking for Star Wars locations—the movie was shot in Tunisia—and he’s quite funny when he imagines Odysseus’s e-mail (“P: War over—remember my horse idea? Worked!”). Along the way he delivers a few shots at “nicotine-stained Eurotrash” and complains mildly about being on a cruise ship with 200 versions of his grandmother, but for the most part he is a generous spirit, interested more in his own pursuits than in condemning those of others. Huler writes with a profound informality (the Cicones give Odysseus “an ass whipping”) and sprinkles his tale with allusions to Scooby-Doo, jackalopes and Law & Order, but he also delivers scholarly mini-lessons on Homer’s identity and the oral tradition. Far from crashing on the rocks, he returns from his voyages of discovery with much knowledge and—no surprise—a sharper appreciation for native grounds.
Part travelogue, part lit-crit, part self-discovery, part paean to home—and all in all, a most fantastic voyage.Pub Date: March 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-8282-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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