Dejean obviously knows and loves Paris, and she provides coherent history that effectively explains the evolution of a city...
Illuminating portrait of the first modern city, 17th-century Paris, which could “hold a visitor’s attention with quite different splendors.”
DeJean (Romance Languages/Univ. of Pennsylvania; The Age of Comfort: When Paris Discovered Casual—and the Modern Home Began, 2009, etc.) focuses on two kings, Henry IV and his grandson, Louis XIV, who lived 250 years before Baron Haussmann, the great public works leader who massively renovated Paris during the mid-1800s. When the author examines how the Pont Neuf, completed in 1607, was the key to the birth of the city, readers will immediately understand why it was designed and constructed there. Crossing the Seine at the Île de la Cité, it included the first sidewalks anywhere, and it was the first bridge in Paris to offer a gathering place with a view of the river. Suddenly, ladies and gentlemen were out promenading, seeing and being seen. Adding Place des Vosges (originally a silk factory) and the mansions on Île Saint-Louis gave the population the first true neighborhoods. People-watching on the streets raised awareness of fashion and introduced various forms of communication, as well as the first forms of advertising. Pedestrians began to shop using the first shopping guide, printed in 1690. Of course, thievery rose with the presence of the elite, so the first street lighting was installed. Since there was light, the shops stayed open well into the evenings—hence, the “city of light.” Both Henry and Louis built central Paris in just over 100 years, and we can still walk and explore what they left for us. “Paris caused urban planners to invent what a city should be,” writes the author, “and it caused visitors to dream of what a city might be.”
Dejean obviously knows and loves Paris, and she provides coherent history that effectively explains the evolution of a city built by a few prescient men.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60819-591-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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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