This is not a walking guide to Paris, but it is most certainly a guide to seeing and knowing Paris, one no Francophile...
Having lived in Paris for more than 20 years, Baxter (The Most Beautiful Walk in the World: A Pedestrian in Paris, 2011, etc.), a guide to literary walks through the city, won’t show you exactly which streets to follow; rather, he’ll teach you how to know Paris and truly feel the enjoyment of flânerie.
The activity of flânerie encompasses wandering aimlessly, going with the wind, and observing life as you go. One day, a customer asked the author if he did night walks, and the author decided that the five senses should be his guides. The joy of his writing is to realize that, even after living there for two decades, Paris still provides him with new avenues to explore. He divides the book into itineraries guided by the senses, but readers will need to dig deep to appreciate the connections. Readers who love Paris will likely love this book. No one can successfully write about Paris unless they truly love every nuance, oddity, and secret of her life; here, the author shines. Baxter’s knowledge of those who have written about Paris—for years, he has collected such work—will lead readers to all sorts of corners that do not show up in any tourist guides. The author cites surrealist Philippe Soupault’s Last Nights of Paris (1929) to show that in Paris at night, there may not be as much to see as many believe. Rather, the nighttime is a perfect canvas for thinking, a blank page on which to exercise the imagination, developing ideas in the dark. In closing, Baxter writes, “each of us must, in our own way, as with a new lover, seduce, or allow ourselves to be seduced by the Paris night.”
This is not a walking guide to Paris, but it is most certainly a guide to seeing and knowing Paris, one no Francophile should be without.Pub Date: April 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-229625-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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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