Challenging, erudite, and unsettling observations on civilization and its plethora of discontents.
A fragmented, meditative inquiry into sacrifice, revolution, and modernity.
Published in Italy in 1983, and in English translation in 1994, this allusive compendium is the first book of a series by Adelphi Edizioni publisher Calasso (The Art of the Publisher, 2015, etc.), all published in the 1990s, that includes philosophical and literary excursions into Greek myth, Kafka, Indian religious texts, and Baudelaire, circling the same themes: the meaning of sacred ritual, the nature of authority, and the culture of modernity. A new translation by Dixon introduces Calasso to a generation possibly unfamiliar with the earlier volumes. The author takes his title from a legend of an African kingdom where kings were ritually sacrificed by order of the priests until one ruler finds a storyteller so mesmerizing that the priests fall under his spell. The end of the sacrificial ritual, though, proves the downfall of the kingdom. Sacrifice, Calasso concludes, “is the cause of ruin,” but also, “the absence of sacrifice is the cause of ruin.” Society itself “is the ruin because it reverberates the sound of the world, its incessant devouring whirr.” Throughout the book, baffling expressions contrast with lucid judgments, such as the author’s remark that history “can be summed up as follows: for a long time men killed other beings, dedicating them to an invisible object; and then, from a certain point they killed without dedicating this act to anyone.” Only killing itself remains. Calasso is critical of modernity, peopled, he maintains, by nonbelievers who “deny the existence of anything supernatural. These include the harshest bigots.” Karl Marx (“a prisoner of the Enemy he is attacking”), Nietzsche, Freud, Goethe, Pascal, Levi-Strauss, and assorted French modernists appear among a huge cast of literary and political figures whose writings and opinions Calasso juxtaposes and glosses. Serving as a guide through the thorny landscape of cultural transition is Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand (1754-1838), the wily statesman and diplomat influential during and after the French Revolution.
Challenging, erudite, and unsettling observations on civilization and its plethora of discontents.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-25210-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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