A rollicking Roman holiday.
Australian travel-writer Perrottet (Off the Deep End, 1998) makes the most of an inspired notion: to follow in the footsteps of the ancient Romans who once visited with enthusiasm and wonder the far reaches of their extensive empire.
Now based in New York City, the author pens a charming, evocative account of his journeys with pregnant girlfriend Lesley, from Rome to Greece to Turkey to Egypt (down a portion of the Nile in dubious fashion) and home again, where Lesley delivers their child via an appropriate Caesarean section. Perrottet is an amiable and informed tour guide. He knows the significance of what he sees, from Pompeii to Troy to Cairo, and he recognizes as well the humor and irony in all that he “suffers”: seedy hotels operated by unscrupulous proprietors, rickety buses rocketing irresponsibly along dangerous roads, trains whose windows explode with gunfire (just rocks, a laughing conductor assures them), tiny rental cars that shake, rattle, and roll, civil servants from officious to intractable, food that defies description and challenges the constitution, a variety of illnesses and indispositions. Perrottet is not above a leer or two, mentioning at least five times that ancient Greek men enjoyed sexual pleasures with boys; neither will he decline to report the gross—nowhere more amusingly than when he watches Turks aboard a ferry from Greece gleefully videotaping one another as they fill seasick bags with the contents of their stomachs. Hidden amid the hilarity are a few more reflective moments. The Romans liked lots of crowds when they traveled, Perrottet asserts; how different from today, when extreme vacations to the summit of Everest or the dining room of the Andrea Doria attract the adventuresome traveler. The author applies no patina of glamour to ancient conflicts: war is unpleasant, he reminds us, recording a poignant moment at the grave of a great-uncle who fell at Gallipoli.
A rollicking Roman holiday.Pub Date: April 30, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-50432-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
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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