An impressive immersion in the storied precincts of art connoisseurship.
A millennium of production, patronage, scholarship, and rediscovery of medieval manuscripts.
Manuscript devotees get the star treatment in this fascinating and multilayered art history, a natural follow-up to de Hamel’s award-winning previous book, Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts. The "club" includes 12 historical figures featured in short biographical chapters. The author begins with Saint Anselm, the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109. In the 15th century, Vespasiano da Bisticci, "the most successful bookseller in Europe," turned Renaissance Italy’s rediscovery of ancient classics into a business. Simon Bening, active in 16th-century Bruges, is one of the few manuscript illuminators whose name we know. Sir Robert Cotton, an early modern antiquary, owned hundreds of manuscripts, and his classification numbers are still used by the British Library. Rabbi David Oppenheim (1664-1736) acquired Hebrew manuscripts, and Jean-Joseph Rive authored "the most bad-tempered book on manuscripts ever written" in 1789. Other notable club members: Sir Frederic Madden, the first Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum; notorious forger Constantine Simonides; Theodor Mommsen, the only manuscript scholar to win the Nobel Prize for Literature; and Belle da Costa Greene, director of the Pierpont Morgan Library, "the finest library of illuminated manuscripts outside Europe." This tour through manuscript history is dense with facts and dates but never dry. De Hamel, manuscript consultant for Sotheby's since 1975, is a charming and knowledgeable guide, and his “visits” with his subjects—tours of their residences or libraries—brings their obsessions to vivid life. By the end, readers are likely to agree that "illuminated manuscripts are the most entrancing of artefacts, conveyors both of texts and of some of the most refined art ever painted,” as well as “windows into human aspirations, emotions and sense of beauty.” The text features four-color illustrations throughout.
An impressive immersion in the storied precincts of art connoisseurship.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9780525559412
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2023
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
