An amusing, though lightweight, examination of English life in the year 1000. With millennial fever gripping the publishing world, biographer Lacey (Grace, 1994, etc.) and London Independent journalist Danziger bring us back 1,000 years. Using a variety of sources, including the writings of the Venerable Bede, the Julius Work Calendar, and Beowulf, the authors probe topics as varied as Viking military strategy, coin-making, the Easter feast, and the development of English. It’s clear that Christianity permeated almost every aspect of daily life: “This was an age of faith. People believed as fervently in the powers of saints’ bones as many today believe that wheat bran or jogging or psychoanalysis can increase the sum of human happiness.” Christian monks preserved ancient knowledge by painstakingly transcribing Greek and Roman texts; they also established schools and hospitals. The Church’s political power rivaled the state’s, as both institutions promoted reverence for authority. Gerbert of Aurillac, the pope sitting in Rome at the millennium, was a ruthless political infighter and a brilliant scholar who helped popularize the abacus. The authors dub him, somewhat glibly, “the first millennium’s Bill Gates.” The book possesses a wide-ranging, quickly shifting focus that is alternately charming and exasperating. Like hummingbirds, the authors never spend much time on any one subject. For example, they’ll begin a chapter by discussing bread-making, then shift to the problems posed by insects, before finishing with the horrors of medieval medicine (leeches, bloodletting, etc.). While they lack the concentrated approach of historians, they’re quite entertaining. The book is weakest, however, when it tries to draw parallels between the year 1000 and today. It’s more than silly, for example, when they refer to the medicinal herb agrimony as “the Viagra of the year 1000.” A diverting and accessible read, though hardly noteworthy scholarship. Like a box of chocolates, it’s appetizing fun without much nutritional value. (13 b&w illustrations) (Radio satellite tour)
Pub Date: Feb. 10, 1999
ISBN: 0-316-55840-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
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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