Less concerned with ethics than with narrative, novelist Vrettos (Lord Elgin's Lady, 1982, etc.) chronicles the odyssey of the so-called Elgin Marbles from Athens to London against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars. Vrettos undermines his story's colorful firsthand material, such as diplomatic correspondence and Lady Elgin's letters, by awkwardly adding some novelistic touches with dialogue and scene- setting—superfluous in any case, for the material is colorful enough. Having survived Roman and Gothic invasions of Greece, the works of the ancient sculptor Phidias had fared badly under the Byzantines, Venetians, and Turks before Elgin, a Scottish diplomat obsessed with classical art, absconded with them in 1802. Justifying his right to their removal as negotiated with the Ottoman Porte, Lord Elgin contemptuously observed that ``modern Greeks have looked upon the superb works of Pheidias with ingratitude and indifference. They do not deserve them!'' In many ways, Elgin had more difficulty returning to England than did his loot. Caught at the outbreak of war, he was held hostage in Paris and the Pyrenees, in part because Napoleon wanted the celebrated sculptures for the Louvre. Before Elgin could arrange his return, Byron, who was to die fighting for Greek independence, castigated him as ``the last, the worst, dull spoiler'' of the Parthenon. Elgin came back to England only to find Parliament unenthusiastic about purchasing the treasures for the British Museum. He had to marshall support from the English art community while fending off bankruptcy and divorcing his long-suffering wife for adultery. But while Vrettos has a remarkable story to tell, he does not entirely unearth its characters' odd lives and complex motives. (16 pages b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-55970-386-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997
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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