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THE HERO'S WAY

WALKING WITH GARIBALDI FROM ROME TO RAVENNA

An account that ably retraces the flight of a revolutionary but offers limited insights into Italy's present.

The British author and Italian culture expert retraces Italian resistance fighter Giuseppe Garibaldi's flight toward freedom for a contemporary audience.

Parks set himself a daunting task in this travel memoir, challenging both his physical stamina and literary gifts. In the summer of 2019, he and his partner, Eleonora, set out to retrace by foot the flight of the charismatic leader of Italy’s 19th-century unification movement after his troops lost a critical fight to hold Rome for liberation. Parks and Eleonora tried to follow the exact 400-mile route of Garibaldi and his exhausted men—and at the same time of year, blazing July. They hiked up to 20 miles per day from Rome toward Garibaldi’s destination: the Adriatic Sea, where he and his troops hoped to escape three separate armies (French, Austrian, and Spanish) called upon by Pope Pius IX to capture them. Parks followed his route along traffic-clogged freeways; through beautiful Tuscany, “an English dream of quaintness in a Mediterranean climate”; and over Italy’s Apennine Mountains. They met clueless tourists, vicious dogs, and Italians disgusted with the tarting up of their historic districts for the tourist trade. The author does an exemplary job weaving together different historical accounts of the march, and he brings Garibaldi’s charisma, determination, and desperation to vivid life. He is less successful at interpreting the present. His descriptive passages of the Italian countryside sing, but he provides little context for the politics and economy of contemporary Italy. After eavesdropping, he re-creates the overheard conversation without follow- up or amplification. Italy’s beautiful old villages, he notes, have been wantonly transformed into “centres of upmarket culture,” and his overheard speakers seem to agree. Is there a counterpoint to this argument? Not in this book. Students of historic and contemporary Italy will enjoy the author’s vivid revival of Garibaldi’s ordeal, and his dry wit is on full display, but he missed an opportunity to make this dramatic story more accessible to general readers.

An account that ably retraces the flight of a revolutionary but offers limited insights into Italy's present.

Pub Date: July 6, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-393-86684-1

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: April 27, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Awards & Accolades

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  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2017


  • New York Times Bestseller


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  • National Book Award Finalist

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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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