The years around 1000 CE seem to be every medieval historian’s favorite era, but Brown’s welcome addition to the genre...
A thoroughly engrossing account of the Dark Ages and one of its Popes, both far less dark than popular histories teach.
Journalist and science writer Brown returns to the period of her previous book (The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman, 2007, etc.) to concentrate on Gerbert of Aurillac (946–1003), an educator who became an archbishop, counselor to kings and emperors and finally Pope Sylvester II in 999. Although Gerbert was only a modestly important figure, the author interweaves her biography with a rich portrait of a society in which the usual litany of medieval ignorance and superstition are not much in evidence. Educated in a Church school, Gerbert learned not only the Bible but rhetoric, ancient classics, astronomy, mathematics and music. He traveled widely, visiting Spain, then largely ruled by Muslims, where he admired their learning and probably introduced both Arabic numbers and the abacus into Europe. Gerbert’s hundreds of surviving letters reveal intense curiosity about mathematics and nature, and Brown emphasizes that his educated contemporaries (almost all churchmen) shared this interest. They built instruments, drew maps, gave technical advice to rulers and used complex devices such as the astrolabe to study the stars, tell time and make precise calculations. The author gives equal time to medieval science, to debunking myths (educated men knew the earth was round) and to the tortured contemporary politics that preoccupied Gerbert for the last decade of his life.
The years around 1000 CE seem to be every medieval historian’s favorite era, but Brown’s welcome addition to the genre provides a lively, eye-opening portrait of a sophisticated Europe whose intellectual leaders showed genuine interest in learning.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-465-00950-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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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