The great artists, explorers and scientists of the period are well-noted, but La Serenissima is the true subject of this...
The story of the spirit of the Most Serene Republic of Venice.
Novelist and nonfiction author Strathern (The Artist, the Philosopher, and the Warrior: Da Vinci, Machiavelli, and Borgia and the World They Shaped, 2011, etc.) points out that Venice was, for hundreds of years, a commercial republic, a trade center happy to flaunt her wealth, and highly pragmatic in her politics, diplomacy and religion. Her navy was world famous, and with good reason; the most famous condottiere, Bartolomeo Colleoni (1400–1475), actually dragged ships over a mountain to Lake Garda to relieve Brescia from Milanese forces. Strathern deftly weaves the history of the near-continuous wars with Genoa and Milan into short biographical sketches of the Venetian giants of the arts and sciences. She fostered so many innovations, they’re difficult to list. Her bureaucracy was second to none, and it served as the birthplace of statistics, double-entry accounting and the concept of the assembly line (which could outfit a galley in the time it took to eat dinner). It was the home of the first journalist, satirist Pietro Aretino (1492–1556), and, thanks to the printing press, the first regular newspaper. The presses were also able to spread the music of opera, and the first tourist guide was published in 1581, 16 years after “Il Catalogo…(The Catalogue of All the Main and Less Honoured Courtesans of Venice).” Venice also served as the bulwark against the Eastern empires, but when her powers weakened, the Ottomans and, finally, Napoleon put an end to her greatness. After the French army left, writes the author, “[t]he 1,000-year-old Republic of Venice was no more.”
The great artists, explorers and scientists of the period are well-noted, but La Serenissima is the true subject of this book, and a better inducement to visit would be hard to find.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60598-489-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
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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