Densely detailed but highly readable—a fine one-volume survey of the Italian Renaissance.
A noted scholar of pre-modern Italy recounts a golden age whose effects extend into the present.
In a memoir written in 1575, writes historian Fletcher, an Italian doctor and mathematician named three innovations that had changed the world in his lifetime: “firearms, the compass, and printing.” The first two helped lead the discovery of the world and conquest of parts of it. Italy should have been in a perfect spot to undertake that work, but it was bound up in damaging in-fighting between city-states and principalities and, eventually, in conflicts between larger powers—the Holy Roman Empire versus the Papal States, for instance. Aspects of those conflicts fueled great achievements of the Renaissance, a term that means “rebirth” but in the sense of “raising the dead”: Machiavelli’s The Prince, for example, which “should be read…in the context of the ongoing wars.” Leonardo da Vinci professed to not like war but had no qualms about selling designs for military technology to the Ottomans, the scourge of the Mediterranean. Fletcher employs a large cast of characters, seeking to “arrange them into their galaxy” as she recounts the lives and accomplishments of great men and women and ordinary people alike, the latter of whom were perhaps less scientifically inclined than we might like. When plague struck, leading to the brilliance that was the Decameron, Italian cities expelled their prostitutes not as a direct health measure but because by chasing sin out they might be saved from the worst excesses of avenging angels. Fletcher’s colorful pages are peppered with stories of anti-Semitic cruelty, religious and political reform, “senior managers” like Rodrigo Borgia, and of course Michelangelo. The author constructs a deft portrait of a country and time whose “importance has been defined by culture and ideas more than by wealth and power.”
Densely detailed but highly readable—a fine one-volume survey of the Italian Renaissance.Pub Date: June 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-19-090849-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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