In this lively, absorbing “saga” of Europe (which, the author makes clear, is as much imaginative re-creation as history) at the end of the last millennium, Reston (Galileo, 1994, etc.) depicts a turbulent Europe as expectant of an imminent apocalypse as are today’s doomsayers. In his 11th book, Reston paints end-of-millennium Europe as a benighted, besieged place—in 950 a.d. it seemed to many as if pagan and Muslim enemies of Christendom were on the brink of conquering the Christian kingdoms, while the Church was undermined by pervasive corruption and internecine conflict. Yet by the year 1000 the Church was ascendant everywhere, having converted the savage Norse and Magyar chiefs and helped to check the Muslim advance into the Iberian peninsula. Reston explains how this transformation occurred, bringing vibrantly alive the dominant personalities of the period, among them King Olaf Trygvesson of Norway, whose conversion to Christianity marked the beginning of the end of the ravages of the Norsemen; Gerbert of Aurillac, the brilliant intellectual man of action who helped Hugh Capet assume the throne of France and who, as Pope Sylvester II, led a revitalizing reform of Western Christianity; and the Magyar Vajk, ruler of the terrible horsemen who had terrorized Central Europe, who converted and became King Stephen of Hungary. Reston vividly evokes significant battles, including the heroic stand of the English against the Vikings at Maldon and the destruction of the Viking fleet by the Greeks on the Black Sea. He also convincingly argues that it was the conversion of pagan rulers to Christianity that truly made possible the transformation of the embattled kingdoms of 10th-century Europe into the familiar “Christendom” of history. Ultimately, Reston shows, the period was in fact a kind of apocalypse: As a result of all this turbulent activity, the old world died and a new one arose in its place. A thoughtful, briskly told narrative that makes the period come alive. (32 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: March 2, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-48326-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1998
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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