A spritely visit to the land of rare books.
The role of printed books in Western civilization recounted in diverting essays that recapitulate some significant events in the annals of bibliomania.
The Romneys—Rebecca is the rare-book expert on the History Channel’s Pawn Stars; J.P. is a writer and historical researcher—tell the secrets of paper and ink, publishing and buying, selling and collecting printed books. The authors offer bright character sketches of the book world’s saints and sinners, heroes and losers, savants and simple dopes. They reveal the ineluctable power of the printing press and the odd peccadilloes of antiquarian book people. They also include obligatory discussions of Gutenberg’s Bible and Shakespeare’s First Folio, which holds a certain “curse” in that “most of those who participated in the creation of Shakespeare’s Folio were dead within four years.” The drollery among the dusty bookshelves will attract general readers to the innocuous pleasures of bibliomania. Within the entertaining passages, the authors define terms like “incunabula,” “colophon,” and “ISBN” for the uninitiated, and they pay homage to renowned publishers across the years. Along with favorites of the bookish folk, the Romneys introduce characters like Marino Massimo De Caro, the talented rare-book forger; T.J. Cobden-Sanderson, who built and destroyed what has been called the most beautiful type font ever; and monastic Johannes Trithemius, defender of the art of handwriting against the advance of the new technology of the printing press. Here, too, is Mercator mapping the globe, Dickens pleading for royalties from America, and Mary Wollstonecraft serving as the model of a modern liberated lady. The authors’ description of the printing and dissemination of Western literature, mythology, and science employs a vocabulary beyond the usual antiquarian lingo, employing occasional double-entendres and mildly naughty words for a contemporary readership—some of the snarky parenthetical asides should amuse bibliomaniacal newbies.
A spritely visit to the land of rare books.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-241231-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
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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