Admirably clear-eyed history related in crystalline prose.
A feminist debunking of the myth of a monstrous Renaissance noblewoman.
Countess Báthory Erzsébet—or Elizabeth Bathory, as she’s referred to in English and throughout this book—was, until recently, the Guinness Book of World Records champion of serial killers, with 650 possible victims, all virginal young women and girls allegedly dispatched to provide the blood that Bathory bathed in to sustain her youth. Her legend inspired horror films, and a Swedish death metal band borrowed her surname as a sign of its extreme badass-ness. But since the 1980s, scholars have taken a closer look at the historical evidence to uncover a story unlikely to satisfy the bloodlust of a true crime or horror fan. Through close reading of Bathory’s many letters and various contemporary accounts, poet and writer Puhak uncovers a thoroughly pre-modern Renaissance woman, well bred and well read, from a distinguished ancient family. Unusually, for a woman of that time, when her war-hero husband apparently died of the plague, Bathory assumed her husband’s political roles in the counties where their vast estate lay and in the national parliament in Bratislava, all while maintaining her traditional tasks as lady of the manor and ward of a finishing school for noblewomen and courtiers-to-be. She was known for her keen interest in what the Hungarians call igazság. “This refers to truth and justice in the broadest sense,” Puhak writes. Elizabeth was considered “someone with a strong ethical sense…who would fight for what was morally right and not just politically expedient.” How did she wind up with such a ghastly reputation? It’s a complicated story involving Machiavellian intrigue between Catholics and Protestants, Calvinists and Lutherans, Hungarians and Germans, Europe and the Ottoman Empire, and, of course, powerful men stymied by a strong woman.
Admirably clear-eyed history related in crystalline prose.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2026
ISBN: 9781639732159
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | WORLD
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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