A sobering reminder of just how deep-seated is the instinct to destroy other people’s truths.
Venezuelan historian Báez spent what must have been 12 depressing years assembling this horrific chronicle of the centuries-long assault on human memory.
Beginning and ending in Baghdad 2003, with a description of U.S. soldiers standing idly by while mobs looted and burned the National Library (perhaps one million books lost), the author’s English-language debut moves determinedly from ancient times to the present. Biblioclasm is not a new phenomenon, he demonstrates: For reasons varying from invasion and vandalism to pure viciousness, more than 80 percent of Egyptian literature has been lost, only seven of Sophocles’s 120 plays survive and millions of ancient tablets and scrolls have vanished. Contrary to popular conception, Báez notes, it is not often the ignorant who order and execute the destruction of books and libraries. It is instead the powerful, sometimes even the highly educated, who insist that their truth be the only one and all others must perish. His text roams the world, revisiting bibliocausts on all continents in all centuries. (It also covers the fictional destruction of books, with a nod to Don Quixote as the first to deal with this issue and several references to Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.) Emerging religions have their works destroyed and then, when they supplant the original destroyers, commence destructions of their own. Romans destroyed Christian documents; Christians destroyed the Romans’; Catholics burned Protestant manuscripts; Henry VIII eradicated monastic libraries in England; and so on. Invading Spaniards destroyed written records in the New World; Spanish Fascists burned their own country’s history. Nazis and Communists and American atomic bombs have done their worst. Báez pauses occasionally to consider such natural disasters as earthquakes, floods and flames, or the damage wrought by beetles, worms and acidic paper. These asides serve merely to remind us that books’ greatest enemy stares back at us from history’s mirror.
A sobering reminder of just how deep-seated is the instinct to destroy other people’s truths.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-934633-01-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlas & Co.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2008
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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