A treat for book lovers.
The role of books in the Florentine Renaissance.
In his latest, King revisits Florence, the setting for Bruneschelli’s Dome. In 1433, on a street that was “at the very center of Florence’s manuscript trade,” 11-year-old Vespasiano da Bisticci began a “long and astounding career as a maker of books and a merchant of knowledge.” Known to many as the “king of the world’s booksellers,” the bright and amiable Vespasiano was well positioned to become friends with some of the city’s most influential and book-loving citizens, including Pope Eugenius IV and Cosimo de’ Medici. Besides making magnificent, illustrated books for wealthy customers and assisting them in building their libraries, Vespasiano’s main claim to fame, argues King, was his own book, The Lives of 103 Illustrious Men, which Swiss historian Jacob Burkhardt used as a primary reference for his influential The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). Vespasiano wrote about important manuscript hunters who unearthed ancient texts that were vital to literary and historical scholarship. He became an expert on the manuscripts and authors and traveled to inspect private libraries and make purchases for his bookshop and wealthy clients, took commissions to help stock important libraries, and hired copyists to reproduce manuscripts. King discusses in lavish detail how scribes copied manuscripts and illustrators produced illuminated decorations. The development of new scripts allowed speedier copying; one Florentine copyist could produce 20 pages, front and back, in two days. “The 1460s,” writes the author, “witnessed a higher production of manuscripts in Europe than at any point in history.” Throughout, King deftly navigates Florence’s rich cultural and political history, painting intimate portraits of Vespasiano and others involved in the book world during these incredible times, including the man who would revolutionize it all, Johannes Gutenberg. Vespasiano’s fascinating and expansive story occasionally sags under the weight of the author’s desire to leave no detail unturned.
A treat for book lovers.Pub Date: April 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8021-5852-9
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
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 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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