Fans of Follett and cathedrals alike will enjoy his exploration of the great Parisian edifice—and will want more.
A survey of the storied history of Notre-Dame Cathedral, a victim of a devastating fire in April 2019.
Follett (Edge of Eternity, 2014, etc.) knows a thing or two about medieval cathedrals, having structured his Kingsbridge series around the building of one such architectural wonder. It’s for that reason that when Notre-Dame, the jewel at the heart of Paris, caught fire, the media flocked to the author for commentary. He began informally, he relates here, tweeting to friends and followers that it’s not hard for a gigantic tower of stone to catch fire: “The rafters consist of hundreds of tons of wood, old and very dry. When that burns the roof collapses, then the falling debris destroys the vaulted ceiling, which also falls and destroys the mighty stone pillars that are holding the whole thing up.” Though badly damaged, the cathedral’s pillars held up, and French President Emmanuel Macron has promised that the damage will be repaired within five years. Follett casts some doubt on that optimistic timetable while noting, “it is always unwise to underestimate the French.” In this slender essay, he connects the events of 2019 to the building of Notre-Dame over a century, beginning in 1163. It was, he writes, the equivalent of a space launch today, benefiting whole segments of the society and economy and yielding tremendous technological advances. However, he writes, “when you add up all the pragmatic reasons, they’re not quite enough to explain why we did it.” Indeed, generations of builders would die before the cathedral was finished in 1345, yet they threw themselves into the godly work. The proceeds from this book, which touches on such things as Victor Hugo’s novelistic celebration of Notre-Dame and Charles De Gaulle’s celebrated Te Deum there on the liberation of Paris from Nazi occupation, are being earmarked for the restoration, another space launch–worthy mustering of our better angels.
Fans of Follett and cathedrals alike will enjoy his exploration of the great Parisian edifice—and will want more.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984880-25-3
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
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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