A book that will have greater appeal to educated travelers to Florence than to specialists in the city.
Novelist and historian Strathern returns to Renaissance Florence to survey the graces and disgraces of the city and its people.
If Vanity Fair magazine had existed during the Renaissance, every issue might have brought tales of Florentine A-listers and their power plays, artistic triumphs, sexual exploits, and financial chicanery. Strathern aims to show how such Florentines paved the way for a global humanism focused on people’s lives on Earth instead of on the medieval view that existence was only preparation for an afterlife. The author begins with Dante’s boldness in writing in a Tuscan dialect, rather than Latin, and ends with Galileo’s trial for heresy, which spared him the fate of an earlier heliocentrist who was burned at the stake—“naked, upside down, and with his mouth gagged so that he could not make public his beliefs.” Between the two events, Strathern gives a no-frills, nuts-and-bolts account of the era in which Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa, Machiavelli wrote The Prince, Michelangelo created David, Brunelleschi designed the world’s largest brick-and-mortar dome, and Savonarola planned his “bonfire of the vanities.” Never far from the action were Lorenzo the Magnificent and other Medici bankers whose patronage of artists vastly enriched the city’s glories. This story will be broadly familiar to readers of Strathern’s The Medici and Death in Florence. The author slightly overstates Florence’s impact on the world when epochal upheavals were also occurring elsewhere: the Reformation, Columbus’ voyages, Gutenberg’s printing press. But Strathern is an intellectually agile writer who covers four centuries briskly—an approach well suited to first-time visitors to Florence, if not to scholars—and serves up occasional surprises. Other authors have argued that Leonardo and Michelangelo were gay, but Strathern adds context by noting that Florentines had a “relaxed” view of homosexuality evident in their startling proverb: “If you crave joys fumble some boys.”
A book that will have greater appeal to educated travelers to Florence than to specialists in the city.Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64313-732-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
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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