Mostly, though, this is a quiet, sometimes plodding history that could use some of the verve of Steven Runciman’s Sicilian...
Sturdy if stodgy history of a cradle of early Mediterranean civilization since fallen on hard times.
“This is Africa: compared to these peasants the Bedouins are the pinnacle of civilization.” So sniffed an agent of Prime Minister Cavour around the time of Italian unification. Many Italians from Rome share that view today, and part of the appeal of Italy’s current prime minister was his party’s pledge to split the country again so that the prosperous north could be even more prosperous. In its day, though, the Mezzogiorno (akin to Midi in France) saw glories, as Neapolitan scholar Astarita (History/Columbia Univ.) writes; the Greeks who colonized it and the Romans who succeeded them found it to be an Arcadia of rich soil and striking scenery, while the Normans, Venetians and Spaniards who followed found in the South possibilities for wealth and plentiful good food and wine. The medieval rulers of the South, too, tended to a certain liberality; as Astarita says, “The region was at least as multireligious, multicultural, and multilingual as the Iberian Peninsula before the Catholic Reconquest.” In the modern era, the South declined, at about the time that cultural diversity was suppressed by the Counter Reformation; Naples, its most populous and important city, showed by 1600 its present combination of extreme wealth and extreme poverty. Southern Italy is now a national afterthought, though Astarita has hopes that “in the future there will no longer be room to doubt that this ancient land is indeed fully part of an integrated Europe.” There’s much drama possible in the many stories Astarita passes along as he offers up his portrait of a still-varied region: here, brother betrays brother; there, serfs battle absentee landlords in an obscure Sicilian village that will give its name to two famous English novelists; and there, now and again, a volcano erupts.
Mostly, though, this is a quiet, sometimes plodding history that could use some of the verve of Steven Runciman’s Sicilian Vespers.Pub Date: July 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-393-05864-6
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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