Of much interest to readers who, like the author, nurse a passion for books, and for books about books.
An uneven but entertaining exploration of the world of books.
Like his bestselling A Gentle Madness (1995), Basbanes’s new tome takes readers on a whirlwind tour of the Western world’s great libraries, bookstores, and museums, with side visits to a few illustrious collectors and scholars. Little ties these darting trips together save for the nostalgic sense that there is a parallel culture far superior to our own in which books reign supreme, a bibliophilic universe populated by the likes of Callimachus, Thomas Carlyle, and Jorge Luis Borges and free of intrusions from the unwashed, unlettered masses. Filing reports along the way, Basbanes travels widely but never deeply in that parallel world. He spends time, for instance, with the Italian scholar, popular writer, and fanatical collector Umberto Eco, poking around in Eco’s 30,000-volume library while never quite getting around to asking what drives him, or other bibliomaniacs, to devote extraordinary efforts to chasing down rare first editions and incunabula. Though superficial, Basbanes’s anecdotes will bring considerable pleasure to those who value books and learning; through them, we’re treated to behind-the-curtains views of little-visited places such as the monastic library at Mount Athos, Greece, where one brother “is creating a digital archive of eleven hundred manuscripts . . . quite a turnaround for a way of life that almost did not make it to the twenty-first century,” and allowed to leaf, at least by proxy, through books over which Founding Fathers, scholars, and saints once pored. Basbanes spends a little too much time on ground already well trod by others (in particular, Nicholson Baker, who has more effectively protested barbarisms committed by libraries [Double Fold, p. 155] in the interest of making space for new acquisitions), but even there his enthusiasm for books and their makers is overwhelming.
Of much interest to readers who, like the author, nurse a passion for books, and for books about books.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-019695-5
Page Count: 656
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
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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