Like-minded readers may chafe at hearing the story of Johnson and his Boswell for the zillionth time. But we won’t stop...
Another sampling of what some will call cultural history, others book chat, from the indefatigably bookish author (A Splendor of Letters, 2005, etc.).
This time, Basbanes considers how books have “made things happen” and their various effects on readers’—and writers’—lives. This book’s organization is a bit haphazard, as we’re offered rehashed literary facts and arguments (e.g., about the Shakespeare authorship controversy, history-making works such as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, reading habits of eminent persons, Edmund Wilson’s role in creating the Library of America). Still, Basbanes’s enthusiasm is winning, and he has fresh, valuable things to say about historian Edward Gibbon’s lifelong bibliomania and the habit of annotating one’s books (perfected by Coleridge, the master of marginalia). He does provide a nifty seminar of sorts on appreciating poetry, featuring the razor-sharp minds of critics Helen Vendler and Christopher Ricks. Their observations are drawn from the interviews that are this book’s best feature. Robert Fagles, who has superbly translated both of Homer’s epics, woolgathers incisively about his craft’s perils and pleasures. Biblical scholar Elaine Pagels proves particularly eloquent on a range of topics, including the church’s suppression of “apocryphal” texts and Dan Brown’s iconoclastic bestsellers (and Basbanes adds a gently chastening contrast between American readers’ “biblical ignorance” and the thorough knowledge of the Qur’an possessed by most Muslims). Good words emerge from a lively meeting of minds with that “most ardent of bibliomaniacs,” teacher-writer-editor-collector Matthew J. Bruccoli, and the resident national intellectual Harold Bloom’s plaintive declaration, “I think I have read all the books. So now I reread all the books.”
Like-minded readers may chafe at hearing the story of Johnson and his Boswell for the zillionth time. But we won’t stop turning pages, will we?Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-059323-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2005
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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