To the casual observer, the Brescia air show may seem to have held little historical meaning, but some things are destined...
Working like a master cabinetmaker, Demetz (Prague in Black and Gold, 1997, etc.) shapes all the parts of the 1909 air show in northern Italy into a striking, proportioned whole.
“I am intrigued by the Brescia air show as a unique encounter of resourceful engineers, daring pilots, visionaries from the provinces, and eminent artists and writers,” says Demetz. And he does make a productive chaos of the details in his relaxed storytelling voice that ambles along, curious, graceful, and esoteric. A scant six years after the Wright brothers lifted off at Kitty Hawk, airplanes still had an Icaran fabulousness about them, of transgression and audacity, but other themes were at play in Brescia as well: nationalist aspirations, money, prestige, the potential for tragedy. Giamcomo Puccini was drawn to the event and so were poet Gabriele d’Annunzio, the King of Italy and Princess Letizia, as well as Franz Kafka and Max Brod, there to report on the story. Despite bad weather, balking planes (Kafka wrote of them “irresolutely moving on the runway like a clumsy fellow on the dance floor”), and motors that failed, the show provided sufficient drama as the fragile cloth and wood planes soared and crashed. Demetz gathers the impressions of Puccini and d’Annunzio, then writes that “Both Kafka and Brod had keen eyes for the shapes and secrets of ladies’ dresses” (as well as for the fliers themselves) and that Brod “cannot hide his aesthetic interest in atmosphere and color.” The show was “an almost Arcadian affair [as] . . . aviators walked away from their damaged planes,” and yet, as Kafka felt, it had dim forebodings, and one can almost see WWI on the horizon.
To the casual observer, the Brescia air show may seem to have held little historical meaning, but some things are destined to have a particular symbolism, and Demetz has artfully sensed that this was one of them. (18 b&w illustrations, color frontispiece)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-374-10259-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
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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