A densely packed, dizzyingly detailed tale of art and espionage.
Archaeologist and journalist Silver traces the route of a lost masterpiece.
More than 2,500 years ago, Athenian artist Euphronios created a krater (bowl) and kylix (chalice) depicting the death of Sarpedon, a son of Zeus killed by Patroclus during the Trojan War. Buried for two millennia within the tombs of the wealthy former inhabitants of Caere (now Cerveteri), the ceramics were unearthed in 1971 by local tombaroli (tomb robbers). Not knowing the real value of Euphronios’s work, the robbers sold the fragments to their dealer, Giacomo Medici. Medici sold the krater to the American department-store scion Robert Hecht, who in turn sold it to the Metropolitan Museum, under chief of Greek and Roman art Dietrich von Bothmer, for $1 million in 1972. Though the Met was not forthcoming about the artifact’s provenance, the krater made a sensational debut in the press. However, according to the statutes of an antiquities law enacted by Mussolini in 1939, all ancient artifacts found on Italian soil became property of the state, and the Italian police were already hot on the trail of the Cerveteri tombaroli. When the news of a companion chalice—its whereabouts mysterious for years—became public, the lawsuits against Medici began. He was eventually convicted of supplying hundreds of undocumented objects to auction houses and museums around the world, among them Euphronios’s krater, which returned to Italy in 2008. Though it becomes convoluted, Vernon’s sharply rendered account is engrossing.
A densely packed, dizzyingly detailed tale of art and espionage.Pub Date: June 2, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-155828-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
