An original, curious subject rendered in readable prose.
A layman’s-terms explanation of the mysterious outbreak of a hysterical dance that seized people in the Middle Ages.
Synthesizing a great deal of scholarly material—mostly in German and Latin—on the dancing malady that broke out along the Rhine during times of great social and economic stress, Waller (History of Medicine/Michigan State Univ.; The Real Oliver Twist, 2005, etc.) covers the academic subject matter in lively, simplified language. The author concentrates in particular on the dancing frenzy that swept through Strasbourg in the summer of 1518, eventually claiming hundreds of lives. The outbreak was the culmination of enormous upheaval in Europe on the eve of the Protestant Reformation, and Waller carefully reconstructs the desperate social milieu of the era. Poor harvests triggered famine; devastating diseases such as syphilis and small pox were perceived as evidence of God’s wrath; excesses by the clergy had engendered a simmering peasant rebellion; and a deeply ingrained, vicious misogyny provoked hysterical symptoms in women. Frau Troffea, the first “choreomaniac,” began to dance on July 14, 1518. She couldn’t stop and soon others had caught on, descending into a kind of trance. The dancing was contagious and uncontrollable, rather than joyful, and Waller attributes it to a flight from extreme psychological distress. Martin Luther’s subsequent push for reformation of the Church helped alleviate the peoples’ “spiritual despair,” and the dancing madness did not reoccur in the same form—though Waller helpfully traces trancelike spiritual outpourings in later forms, such as among the Quakers, Shakers and even participants in the modern rave scene.
An original, curious subject rendered in readable prose.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4022-1943-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2009
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
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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