Find a real historian if you want to read about the Cathars, and tune into the nightly news if you want to know about...
O’Shea’s (Back to the Front, 1997) tendentious study of medieval France.
Don’t expect to learn much about the beliefs of the Cathars (the 12th- and 13th-century heretics who argued that the Church should be more like the early, primitive Christians) here. Centered largely in the south of France, the Cathars, like the Manicheans, believed in a strict duality between good and evil, and they rejected the body and the material world as bad. Christ, in their view, was not really resurrected, and they renounced marriage and the other sacraments, as well as the resurrection of the dead, hell, and purgatory. But O’Shea is not very interested in the nuances of Cathar doctrine, preferring instead to focus on the Crusades (launched under Pope Innocent III), which sought to bring the Cathars to heel in the early 13th century. Although the author rightly traces the Inquisition in part to the Church’s desire to stamp out the Cathar heresy, readers will not find very much here about the development of the Dominican Order—which, no less than the Inquisition, grew out of the Church’s struggle to restore orthodoxy. O’Shea’s approach is oddly provincial in its contemporary obsessions—he seems to find religious intolerance today as interesting as the Church’s response to the Cathar heresy. Even his brief portrait of Cathar women (in which we learn that the Cathars “honored” their women and that women had a say in “the affairs of the hereafter”) may tell us more about the present than the Middle Ages. In addition, the author’s self-conscious attempts at literary flair (“To approach Carcassonne for the first time is to dream with your eyes open”) are irritating, and his epilogue (which ranges from French pop music to the Order of the Solar Temple) is superfluous.
Find a real historian if you want to read about the Cathars, and tune into the nightly news if you want to know about religious persecution today. In trying to tell us something about both, O’Shea winds up telling us nothing about either.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2000
ISBN: 0-8027-1350-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
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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