A bit of a stretch, but it’s a light-pedaling, virtuosic work of epistemology.
An ambitious, if not entirely successful, synthesis of the old-fashioned, pious ideals of Sebastian Bach and the newfangled values of the enlightened monarch Frederick the Great.
Gaines’s history of the dawning Enlightenment in the German states is dazzling but somewhat fractured, since Frederick was twenty-seven years older than Bach and the two didn’t actually meet until Bach was 62, three years before his death in 1750. That meeting, in Potsdam, between the foremost adherent of the esoteric theory of counterpoint and the fashionable, not-easily-impressed philosopher king proved “the tipping point,” Gaines asserts, “between ancient and modern culture in the West” and resulted in Bach’s magisterial closing statement, The Musical Offering. American journalist Gaines (Wit’s End: Days and Nights of the Algonquin Round Table, 1977), now Paris-based, ranges across the century in order to capture the backgrounds of the men: first, we have Bach’s Baroque roots in a long line of church musicians from Thuringia, culminating in his post as Royal Composer to the Leipzig court; then we have Frederick’s ascension to the Hohenzollern throne at twenty-eight, after a childhood under the abusive treatment of his autocratic father. The education of the crown prince makes the more compelling story, as he hides his love of music and all things French and eventually is imprisoned for plotting to flee his father’s violent treatment. But chapters on Bach—however mesmerizing to the musician—tend to mire down in notions of making “sermons in sound” and theories of composition. Bach’s work wasn’t published or played outside of Leipzig until long after his death, while the world considered his son Carl (C.P.E. Bach), Frederick the Great’s keyboard composer for thirty years, the greater musician. In the end, Frederick steals the show here as Gaines offers up a twin-faceted treatment of the ideas of the age—in a work that’s not easily classifiable as music or history but is composed with a refreshingly nonscholarly flourish.
A bit of a stretch, but it’s a light-pedaling, virtuosic work of epistemology.Pub Date: March 4, 2005
ISBN: 0-00-715658-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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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