Those visitors are not nearly as interesting as those who excavated it and the city itself. Rowland provides abundant...
Rowland traces the history of Pompeii (Architecture/Notre Dame Univ.; Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic, 2008, etc.) since the cataclysmic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79.
A lifetime of trips to the ruins of that buried city have shown the author how it has changed since that time, through years of both neglect and excessive restoration. It was generally forgotten until the 16th century, when clues began to emerge as to its exact location. Artifacts from Herculaneum were found first near the wells of Resina by adventurous explorers, who were lowered 65 feet to explore the subterranean structures first hinted at by a canal dug in the 1590s. Lukas Holste’s theory that Pompeii was located beneath the hill at Cività wasn’t confirmed until the mid-1700s, and the site and city languished through the years until Giuseppe Fiorelli began top-down excavation in the 1860s. Fiorelli injected plaster into the oddly shaped bubbles to produce the casts of those who died centuries earlier. The patron saint, San Gennaro, whose blood liquefies each year on his feast day, is highly revered, and it is true that when his blood remains dry, catastrophes arrive—e.g., earthquakes, eruptions, even bombing during World War II. Bartolo Longo came in as a reformer in the 1880s and built New Pompeii with a church, schools and housing for those who lived in these “badlands.” In addition to the history, Rowland also discusses famous visitors to the site. Mozart was more affected by the castrato voices he heard in Napoli, and Freud deduced that the psyche was surely a similar archaeological site to be excavated.
Those visitors are not nearly as interesting as those who excavated it and the city itself. Rowland provides abundant photographs, but many readers will wish for more about the everyday life of Pompeii.Pub Date: March 17, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-674-04793-8
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
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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