Strathern does not take sides as he delivers a deft, often gruesome account of events in that distant era when Christianity...
Boko Haram and the Taliban are uniquely bloodthirsty, but they follow a long tradition of puritan reformers, among them the subject of this book, the Italian Dominican friar Savonarola (1452-1498).
Savonarola gets terrible press, admits novelist and historian Strathern (The Venetians: A New History: From Marco Polo to Casanova, 2013, etc.), in this lively history of a bizarre period during Italy’s golden age. The author opens with a portrait of Renaissance Florence under Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449-1492), who governed through bribes, threats, and strategic marriages but with far more skill than fellow rulers. Strathern admires him but shows equal sympathy with the charismatic friar, already creating a stir with apocalyptic sermons and attacks on corruption, who became the city’s spiritual dictator after Lorenzo’s death and the 1494 expulsion of his incompetent son. Savonarola supported a new constitution that produced “the most democratic and open rule the city had ever known.” For reasons historians still debate, he presided over a citywide crusade against vice resembling that of the 1990s Taliban. Bands of young men patrolled the streets to punish immodest dress and behavior. In the celebrated bonfire of the vanities, enthusiasts destroyed objects of frivolity (mirrors, playing cards, musical instruments), along with books, paintings, and sculpture. Aided by a hostile papacy, the movement ran out of steam, at which point Savonarola was arrested, tortured, and hung. Some argue that he failed because Florentines wearied of life in a theocracy; others, that a corrupt church killed him, something it failed to do with a later reformer, Martin Luther.
Strathern does not take sides as he delivers a deft, often gruesome account of events in that distant era when Christianity was a matter of life and death.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-60598-826-9
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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 Yorkerstaff 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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