Though a figure of major importance, Francis has been forgotten against better known contemporaries such as England’s Henry...
Thoroughgoing biography of the French ruler who allied with Islam in an effort to resist his Habsburg neighbors.
“If ever there were a king who warrants rehabilitation, it is Francis.” So writes Frieda (The Deadly Sisterhood: A Story of Women, Power, and Intrigue in the Italian Renaissance, 1427-1527, 2013, etc.), who makes a solid effort here. Allowing that Francis I was a “deeply flawed figure” who was committed to the principle of absolutist rule and violently suppressed dissenting religionists, the author lends him humanity by examining his scholarly and artistic interests. As she shows, Francis was a man of letters who supported the work of Andrea del Sarto, Leonardo da Vinci, and other artists even if he sometimes experienced disappointment at their hands—Leonardo never produced the great work of art while residing in Paris that Francis hoped for, though he did leave the Mona Lisa, which explains why it’s housed in the Louvre, which Francis had restored. He also took considerable effort to learn the many and diverse regions that made up his domain. Events placed him in contention with the neighboring powers of Europe, including the Habsburgs of Austria and the pope. While Francis “mired himself in a succession of skirmishes and conflicts on too many fronts,” he took some interesting and daring risks, including forging a short-lived alliance with Suleiman the Magnificent, the leader of the Ottoman Empire, leading to the arrival of a “large and potentially dangerous Muslim population” within France; another anti-Italian alliance with the pirate king Barbarossa led to the ransacking of the French fleet. For all his diplomatic and military difficulties and problems with orderly succession, Francis was also a patron of explorers who soon extended France’s empire into the Americas, Africa, and Asia.
Though a figure of major importance, Francis has been forgotten against better known contemporaries such as England’s Henry VIII. Frieda’s work helps restore him to history.Pub Date: March 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-156309-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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