A quirky, affectionate portrait by an unabashed Francophile.
A longtime resident of Paris muses on the city he loves.
As in previous similar books, Baxter (Montparnasse: Paris's District of Memory and Desire, 2017, etc.) proves to be an amiable guide to Paris, where he has lived for nearly 30 years. Evoking history, literature, observations on nature, and digressions on food, customs, and culture, the author ambles through the city, conveying his heartfelt admiration for the French way of life. “We who live in Paris are used to living by the weather and the seasons,” he writes. Unlike America, where New York’s supermarkets feature strawberries in January, the French eagerly anticipate asparagus, stone fruit, and wintry stews at just the right moment. In food, “as in most things, the essence of pleasure resides in timing.” Baxter anchors his Parisian rambles with a tale of the Republican calendar, devised by Philippe François Nazaire Fabre d'Églantine, an actor and self-promoter who became George Danton’s private secretary. Given the task of updating the calendar, beginning in 1792, immodestly designated Year One, Fabre lengthened the hour from 60 to 100 minutes and extended the week from 7 days to 10. Three weeks made a month, and each month was named to reflect the natural world: Floréal, the month of flowers; Prairial, for meadows; Vendemiaire, for the harvest; Nivôse, a winter month, when it snowed—in Paris, but not in the sunny south; followed by Pluviôse, when it rained; and Ventôse, when the winds blew. The calendar was generally ignored, and Fabre met his fate at the guillotine. For Baxter, however, there was something poetic about evoking in the name of the month “the sensual possibilities of the greatest country in the world.” Besides reprising France’s bloody revolutions, the author creates assorted vignettes of Paris past and present: mimes and buskers, politicians’ links to nature (Mitterand preferred roses, Chirac, apples), the inspiration for the song “April in Paris,” the city’s various public pools, and the urban legend of a subterranean crocodile.
A quirky, affectionate portrait by an unabashed Francophile.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-284688-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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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