Extremely well-researched and fluidly written, Harrington’s work will serve as a meaningful resource for students of...
Insightful biography of German theologian Meister Eckhart (1260-1328).
Harrington (History/Vanderbilt Univ.; The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century, 2013, etc.) makes a worthy effort in building this biography around a man whose life is scantily documented. Eckhart left little behind aside from sermons and theological writings, despite being one of the most learned individuals of his day. The author follows what is known of his career and uses other sources to re-create the situations and circumstances that Eckhart most likely experienced in his youth and early adulthood before moving on to his somewhat more documented later years as a public preacher and ecclesiastical administrator. A Dominican monk, Eckhart attained the rare title of “Master,” or “Meister,” of theology through years of study mixed with periods of leadership in his monastic order. In middle age, he began a monumental theological undertaking only to eventually cast it aside in favor of reaching the common populace (including women) with his insights on communion with God. Eckhart’s ideas—which entailed negative theology (i.e., understanding God’s nature by describing what he is not); “letting-go-ness” (gelâzenheit), a mystical technique leading to spiritual rebirth; and direct access to the divine by even the most ordinary layperson—met with mixed reactions. Some were enthralled by his teachings, some did not understand him, and others felt he was flirting with heresy. He died in Avignon amid a papal trial over the content of his works, after which his ideas and very name were largely buried for centuries, only to be rediscovered in full force in modernity. Not only does the author craft an excellent biographical work based on outside sources, he also does an admirable job of presenting Eckhart dispassionately, as a historical figure, a theological innovator, and an impetus for modern thinkers.
Extremely well-researched and fluidly written, Harrington’s work will serve as a meaningful resource for students of mysticism and of late Medieval Christianity.Pub Date: March 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-101-98156-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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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