A vivid history of “the collaboration and integration of the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian peoples of the Mediterranean that...
A dramatic review of Mediterranean history in the Middle Ages.
Catlos (Religious Studies/Univ. of Colorado; The Victors and the Vanquished: Christians and Muslims of Catalonia and Aragon, 1050-1300, 2004, etc.) intentionally veers away from earlier treatments of the age of the Crusades by focusing on the entire Mediterranean region as a diverse and interconnected region. The author moves from west to east as he examines this complex world through the stories of various individuals. He begins in Spain with Abu Ibrahim Isma’il, a Jew who rose to the highest ranks of a Muslim-dominated empire. Catlos then profiles Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, the legendary Christian soldier better known as El Cid. Moving to Italy, the author discusses King Roger II, whose kingdom was religiously and ethnically diverse. In Cairo, Catlos introduces Bahram Pahlavuni, an Armenian Christian who ruled an Islamic empire. Finally, the author examines Reynaud de Châtillon as an archetypal Frankish crusader. These people, and a wide host of others, come alive in the author’s energetic prose. Rather than recounting dry history, Catlos tends to set his stage with imagined scenes of real people dealing with their landscapes, historic circumstances and even climates. A touch of dry humor pervades his writing as well. From beginning to end, readers are struck by the intensely violent nature of this time period, a characteristic that spanned all religions and regions. Though warfare was a given, violence was also deeply personal, and the higher one climbed in any power structure, the more likely they were to be executed or assassinated. “[A]s integrated and cosmopolitan as these societies may have appeared,” writes the author, “they were built on relationships of power in which the threat of violence was ever present.”
A vivid history of “the collaboration and integration of the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian peoples of the Mediterranean that laid the foundation for the modern world.”Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8090-5837-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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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