Welsh does not always pick up the many threads of this complex narrative, but he does a good job of showing how the...
A well-intended but not entirely successful overview of one of Europe’s most turbulent eras, defined by religious schism and the advent of an Islamic enemy.
Historian Welsh (Australia: A New History of the Great Southern Land, 2006, etc.) faces an immediate challenge in attempting to distill a century and a half of late-medieval events into his short study. The device by which he does so is the Council of Constance, convened in 1414, which over the next four years hammered out an agreement on papal succession—no small thing in a time when, owing to schisms and previous councils, three popes were competing to be declared the bishop of Rome. At the same time, the council moved against the Bohemian reformer Jan Hus, burned at the stake at the council’s pleasure in 1415. That act led to decades of civil war and the rise of Protestantism, which was far from its intended effect. In the end, another of the council’s long-debated decisions changed the rules by which popes were elected, with another unintended consequence: “Given the split between the parties it was impossible for an English, German or French pope to be elected, and an Italian was almost the inevitable choice.” Italian popes would rule henceforth, while at the fringes of Europe the Ottoman Empire revealed its expansionist nature, bringing on another great crisis in Christianity. Its upshot was that the Latin pope had a chance to reconcile the Eastern and Western churches but failed to come to the aid of Byzantium, which fell to the Muslim armies and marked “the decline of the Roman papacy as an international power.”
Welsh does not always pick up the many threads of this complex narrative, but he does a good job of showing how the religious and political rivalries of old anticipated later crises in world history.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59020-123-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
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
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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