Not the entire Middle Ages but those justly called dark and what came before, from the first southward barbarian drift to the nadir of disintegration between 900 and 950 — a stunning consolidation of obscure strands that is lit by humanistic and scholarly perspective. It has to be primarily a chronicle of battles, massacres, successions, usurpations, among people who remain only as place-names (an aspect Mr. Asimov as etymologist makes much of); it is also an education. For example, why do they seem to vanish? Because encroaching aristocracies "were without firm roots among the people. . . they could easily be defeated and replaced by another warrior caste. . . the kingdoms are simply the names we give (them) and don't represent the real population at all." The reader is frequently caught up by a significant observation: on the start of the Middle Ages (Gregory's theology); on the extremism of the Visigoths (their late conversion from Arian to Catholic Christianity); on the descent into feudalism (a response to Norse raids, later rationalized as a system). And so on to the turning point, a curious concatenation: the moldboard plow (and the horse collar), the armored knight, the rescue of ancient learning. No other juvenile compares in scope and depth, and few adult books synthesize so simply and clearly.
Pub Date: Sept. 30, 1968
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1969
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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