Strathern’s smooth narrative and comprehensive insight bring the Borgias to life for scholars and amateurs alike.
Strathern’s (The Medici: Power, Money and Ambition in the Italian Renaissance, 2016, etc.) latest venture into Renaissance Italy proves just as exciting as his previous histories.
Rodrigo Borgia (1431-1503), his son, Cesare, and daughter, Lucretia, are the central characters, following in the footsteps of Rodrigo’s uncle, Pope Callixtus III. Rodrigo was by all accounts rich, charming, and an excellent administrator, but he was also impious, avaricious, and cruel. Callixtus appointed him Vice Chancellor, giving him the power of the purse in the Vatican. He held that post through multiple papacies until he became Pope Alexander VI in 1492. He had one ambition: to unify Italy under a Borgia hereditary papacy centered in Rome. Cesare was groomed to take his place, first as a cardinal and then as head of the Papal Forces. Alexander’s diplomatic machinations and Cesare’s brash but effective soldiering made that a possibility. Alexander’s diplomacy came down to being friendly to both Spanish and French forces as they fought over Naples and supporting Venetian, Florentine, and Siennese governments while undermining everyone else. Rodrigo even married Cesare to a woman raised at the French court of Louis XII. With Louis’ help and the Papal Forces, Cesare managed to take almost all the Romagna under his protection. Strathern points to an “inappropriate closeness” in the family. Rodrigo trusted Lucretia above everyone; he not only put her in charge of a province, but also let her administer the papacy in his absence. Cesare’s manic jealousy of Lucretia was powerful, and rumors of his siring of her child and murders of her lover and husband complete that picture of a dangerous man. One of the author’s great strengths has always been his ability to keep the many assorted players from confusing readers, and that holds true in his latest.
Strathern’s smooth narrative and comprehensive insight bring the Borgias to life for scholars and amateurs alike.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64313-083-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 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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