Serviceable but not particularly original.
A global history of the Bible.
Church historian Gordon describes for the reader a sacred book that seems to take on a life of its own. Through two full millennia, the Christian Bible has survived, thrived, and acted as both a holy object and a cultural force. Gordon notes that early Christians “would participate in a communications revolution,” a revolution that continues to this day. Adopting the codex as their chosen medium, Christians would, over the course of several generations, craft a canon of scripture that would survive centuries of cultural fragility in Europe. From the fifth century on, Gordon writes, “the Bible itself became an object of veneration. [It was] the ultimate symbol of the sacred…Christ’s physical presence in the world.” With new technology and the Protestant Reformation, the Bible would move beyond the church and monastery and into the home. No version of the book reflected this cultural sea change more than the King James Bible, which came to dominate the English-speaking world and influence missionary activity outside of it. Spreading into Asia, Africa, and elsewhere, the Bible would be influenced by new, global voices. Gordon describes the story of the Bible as “the story of a life force” and mystically concludes that “the Bible dictates its own history, which is without end.” He has written an approachable history suitable for lay readers, but it adds nothing significantly new to the sizable corpus of works on the same subject. To mention just two examples, Karen Armstrong’s The Bible (2007) provides a more academic viewpoint; John Barton’s A History of the Bible (2019) offers a more critical reading of the Bible’s background.
Serviceable but not particularly original.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9781541619739
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
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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