An illuminating volume designed to whet the reader’s interest in perusing an extensive website.
An overview of medieval scrolls highlights their intricate beauty and various uses.
In a generously illustrated and informative survey, distilled from the Medieval Scrolls Digital Archive website, medievalscrolls.com, Kelly (Music/Harvard Univ.; Capturing Music: The Story of Notation, 2014, etc.) focuses on the creation and use of scrolls in the Middle Ages at a time when books had been in common use since the advent of the codex in the fourth century. Why did people make a scroll when they could make a book? Scrolls, notes the author, have the advantage of being able to grow as needed to take on more information. In fact, “we are now in the new age of the scroll. All you have to do is look at your computer screen, tablet, or e-reader, and just scroll down.” In Egypt, scrolls—such as the Book of the Dead—were made, laboriously, from papyrus; Egyptian papyrus also was the basis for literary scrolls in Greece and Rome. A long work, such as Virgil’s Aeneid, required several scrolls, depending on the length of papyrus. Because new entries could be added, scrolls were useful for financial, legal, and other record-keeping. Kelly identifies scrolls that contained lists of gifts; recipes for cooking, medicine, and alchemy; prayers; petitions; and the testimony of witnesses in trials. Because scrolls could be unfurled in a linear manner, they became useful as maps and guides for holy pilgrimages; similarly, because they could indicate change through time, they were used to record histories and genealogies. In medieval plays and other performances, each actor’s part was written separately on a scroll that could be hidden in the performer’s hand. A director’s scroll served as a combination of promptbook and stage manual. Miniature scrolls, some to be worn hidden in amulets, often contained prayers, magic spells, cryptic inscriptions, or the “names of exotic deities or demons.” Kelly closely examines the many scrolls illustrated and provides some context that illuminates medieval life.
An illuminating volume designed to whet the reader’s interest in perusing an extensive website.Pub Date: April 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-393-28503-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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 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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