At times enjoyable, edifying and humorous, but the conversational style tends too much toward the sophomoric in its attempts...
Occasionally intriguing but too-cute history of eroticism in the ancient world.
Until modern times, marriage was never about love, physical or otherwise; it was political and economic. Sensual enjoyment was much easier to find and enjoy with little consequence, and the Greeks, Romans and Egyptians mastered the art. Authors that attempt to make antiquities cute and bring them into the 21st century play a dangerous game. León (How to Mellify A Corpse: And Other Human Stories of Ancient Science & Superstition, 2010, etc.) has written enough to know better than to toss in silly phrases like “round-the-sundial witness protection,” or marrying the prostitute because the man “didn’t want to time-share.” Mythology abounds naturally in a work about a subject in which the players all believe they perform like gods. The business of sex, not only in those who offer it for sale or for their own safety, has been around since Genesis, and the first published manual was distributed by the Chinese 5,000 years ago. Many readers will think that there is nothing new, and of course, there really isn’t—just a new way of presenting a catalog of what people have always done. The author provides a redeeming amount of etymology—e.g., about fornices, beneath which the ladies of the night developed their job description. Forms, positions, aberrations and self-pollution methods eventually give way to a list of famous love affairs, real and mythological, from Orpheus’ love of Eurydice to Cleopatra’s passion for just about anyone who happened to be near. León seems to have been unable to decide whether to write about myths, history or just plain sex, so she just tossed them all into one basket.
At times enjoyable, edifying and humorous, but the conversational style tends too much toward the sophomoric in its attempts to be cute.Pub Date: Jan. 29, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8027-1997-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2012
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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