Sly, witty, and delightful—a glorious Shakespearean romp.
Knock, knock. Who’s there? Hamlet.
To help celebrate the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, Dromgoole (Will & Me: How Shakespeare Took Over My Life, 2006, etc.), the artistic director of the Globe Theatre in London, came up with a fantastical idea: to perform Hamlet in all 204 countries in the world. “With a few detours to avoid war and epidemics,” they did, settling on 197 countries—no North Korea, of course, and for some reason, France passed. This is Dromgoole’s thoroughly enjoyable and charming story of how they did it: “Unprecedented chutzpah and a healthy quantum of stupidity helped launch the mission.” They picked Hamlet because, in the author’s estimation, it is “a unique play in the canon of world drama” and possibly “the strangest and most beautiful play ever written.” Dromgoole tells several stories. Besides detailing the two-year tour itself, it’s a story of the play, its themes and language, famous past players, and how it has been performed and received over the years. He describes how the 12 original players (plus a few others here and there) and four stage managers were chosen. The tour kicked off in London in April 2014 with two performances. Then it was off to the Netherlands. By mid-May, they had 10 performances under their collective belts. In early August in Mexico City, the company was “crumbling like a castle under bombardment.” Players were ill, and the city was “decked out in full Day of the Dead splendor.” Scenes were omitted, but the play must go on. On the island of Palau, the queen demanded a personal fee of $1,500 to use the performance hall. In Cambodia, the play’s poster featured Hamlet holding Yorrick’s skull; the irony was palpable. In Saudi Arabia, it was the “first time that Shakespeare [was] performed with men and women on the stage.” The final performance took place at the Globe in April 2016.
Sly, witty, and delightful—a glorious Shakespearean romp.Pub Date: April 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2562-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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
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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