Not an original scholar, Cahill serves as an irresistible guide: never dull, sometimes provocative, often luminous.
A prodigiously gifted popularizer of Western philosophical and religious thought spotlights exemplary Christians in the High Middle Ages.
In this fourth of a projected seven-volume series, “Hinges of History,” Cahill (Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea, 2003, etc.) takes issue with the stereotypical depiction of the 12th to early-14th centuries as the superstitious Dark Ages. To be sure, he criticizes the period’s kings and most popes for spreading authoritarianism and corruption. But he reminds us that the period also saw Greek natural philosophy intertwine with Christian “incarnationalism,” which, by seeking God’s truth in human form, revived natural science and produced greater artistic realism in depicting the body. Especially important to these trends were “enveloping, energizing” misfits such as Peter Abelard, Thomas Aquinas, Francis of Assisi, the painter Giotto, the friar-scientist Roger Bacon and the mystic/nun Hildegard. Like another one of these heroes, Dante, Cahill consigns certain of his own contemporaries into a rhetorical hell, notably George W. Bush, for waging “imperial war” in Iraq, and Pope Benedict XVI, for inattention to priest sexual abuse scandals while serving as John Paul II’s chief doctrinal advisor. At worst, his underscoring of contemporary relevance lapses into breeziness (e.g., Eleanor of Aquitaine was a “smart cookie”) and the intellectual parlor game of “What Would So-and-So Do?” (Dante would have been a UN supporter). But Cahill describes Italy’s landscape and people with the same kind of brio that enriched the treatment of his own ancestral country in How the Irish Saved Civilization (1995). Writing of Padua, for example, he notes, “the city boasts some of the largest and best proportioned piazzas in Italy, as well as a twisting fantasy of domes and towers.” The author also excels at underscoring the era’s defining icons, such as images of Madonna and Child that revealed “the innovative Christian sense of grace, no longer reserved for the fortunate few.”
Not an original scholar, Cahill serves as an irresistible guide: never dull, sometimes provocative, often luminous.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2006
ISBN: 0-385-49555-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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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