Of some interest to students of medieval Italian history, less so to those of organized crime.
A historian traces the origins of organized crime in southern Italy to medieval politics.
Feniello begins his narrative with an incident that happened on the street in Naples: the execution of three young men with ties to the local mob. Turning history into a brooding philosophical essay, Feniello wonders about the “source of all this savagery” and whether it has its origins in “something…so deep-rooted that it has carved its way into the viscera of time, allowing the weed of corruption to grow and germinate.” Mixed metaphor (do weeds regularly grow in viscera?) and all, he moves on to discuss an incident in the 1343 of his title, when Neapolitan freebooters seized a Genoese merchant ship, beheaded its owner, and divvied up the spoils—an act worthy of the gibbet, that, but one that Feniello attributes to the roiling politics of contending realms and some very poor policies, including taxing the poor in a time of plague and famine. Those doing the taxing may have had ducat signs in their eyes, but the people had nothing: “Southern Italy was screaming with hunger.” Feniello then charts the growth of antimonarchical resistance and the entrenchment of political power in a handful of local families, giving birth to “a hungry new Neapolitan, a man of both clan and family, a man quick to draw his sword, both solitary and violent.” Feniello’s thesis would seem to be something of a stretch in time, though not in kind: most historians trace the rise of the Mafia to resistance in Sicily, not Naples, against French and Spanish occupiers, though the basis of power in family ties is right. Correct or not, Feniello’s wandering narrative waxes a bit too purple for comfort and often strays from the point.
Of some interest to students of medieval Italian history, less so to those of organized crime.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781590511039
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2024
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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