Wildly ambitious in scope and driven by the author’s passion for the city.
Novelist and historian Clark (Love Among the Ruins, 2001, etc.) delivers a besotted, occasionally unwieldy examination of the lore surrounding Florence’s Arno River, centered around the great flood of 1966.
Living in the northern Italian city at the time of the 40th anniversary of the devastating inundation that nearly destroyed much of its vast treasure trove of artwork, the author began exploring the river as a source of inspiration for numerous artists. How, he wondered, did the geographical site of Firenze, rich in Roman and Etruscan history, become “this imaginary place, Florence,” to which tourists flocked by the 1800s to savor the art and the view? A good background in art history is necessary to follow Clark’s erratic meanderings through the archives. He begins and ends with Cimabue’s very human Crocifisso, created for the Franciscan church Santa Croce in 1288 with the help of his apprentice, Giotto. Increasingly overshadowed by the fame of his protégé, Cimabue’s work would gradually triumph after the flood of ’66 and a controversial restoration by Umberto Baldini. Clark traces the Renaissance careers of Dante, Donatello, Leonardo (who mastered hydrology, ultimately composing The Book of Water) and especially Vasari, whose Lives of the Artists canonized their stories; successive floods informed all their work. By the 19th century, the city was ready to be reborn as Florence, shrine of art, and it became the home of famous foreigners from the Shelleys and Brownings to John Ruskin and Bernard Berenson. The flood of November 4, 1966 threatened catastrophe, but thanks in part to David Lees’ photographs for Life and a film by Franco Zeffirelli, the world came to Florence’s aid, and legions of youthful idealistic volunteers called angeli del fango (angels of the mud) poured in to help save the artwork. Clark recreates the disaster both human and aesthetic, using testimony by witnesses he unearthed, in a book that is by turns riveting and stupefying.
Wildly ambitious in scope and driven by the author’s passion for the city.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7679-2648-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
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 Yorkerstaff 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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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