Levy’s spirited history is nothing less than a love letter to Rome’s luxurious, sensational past.
A cultural history reveals an effervescent decade of riches in postwar Rome.
In this ebullient tour of Rome in the 1950s, film critic and celebrity biographer Levy (De Niro: A Life, 2014, etc.) portrays the city as a burgeoning center of fashion, photography, and, especially, movies. The star of the book—and the most glittering star to emerge from the period—is Sophia Loren, “the greatest living vessel of any number of traits associated with Italy: sensuality, practicality, endurance, glamour, an ironic sense of humor, a zest for the simple pleasures of life.” At first sight, gushes the author, Loren stood out as “one of those superhuman creatures known as movie stars.” Loren, though, is not alone in meriting Levy’s attention. The author traces Federico Fellini’s career from the time he was a journalist to his triumphs as a director, focusing on the conception, casting, and filming of the controversial La Dolce Vita (1960), starring Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg, and 8 ½ (1963), the film that “mixed dream and nightmare and fantasy and real life,” and which some critics deemed the director’s masterpiece. Others colorfully portrayed in Levy’s large cast include actresses Anna Magnani, Gina Lollobrigida (beautiful, but hardly comparable to Loren), Ingrid Bergman, Ava Gardner, Elizabeth Taylor, and Audrey Hepburn; directors Michelangelo Antonioni, Vittorio De Sica, Roberto Rossellini, and Pier Paolo Pasolini; fashion designers Emilio Pucci, Simonetta, and Valentino; and assorted playboys such as Porfirio Rubirosa, who frequented the posh clubs and restaurants on the Via Veneto. That street, and the Trevi Fountain, in which Ekberg famously cooled her feet, mark two of the only sites that Levy describes; physical Rome recedes as he focuses on personalities, careers, and piles of celebrity gossip. To that end, he follows the careers of Rome’s famous photographers, dubbed paparazzi after Fellini portrayed them in La Dolce Vita as “a writhing, snapping, shouting mass.”
Levy’s spirited history is nothing less than a love letter to Rome’s luxurious, sensational past.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-393-24758-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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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