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What's New at Arcadia
Historic Burial Grounds of the New Hampshire Seacoast By Glenn A. Knoblock
Arcadia Publishing has releases a new title in the Images of America series, the historic account of the cemeteries along the New Hampshire Seacoast. This collection is a must for anyone interested in local history, genealogy, or colonial-era art. Please visit Arcadia Publishing to purchase your copy of Historic Burial Grounds of the New Hampshire Seacoast and browse other cemetery books!
Green-Wood Cemetery By Alexandra Mosca
Arcadia Publishing announces the release of the historic account of one of New York's most famous cemeteries. Aracdia Publishing's Images of America series has an extensive catalog of many cemetery publications! Please visit Arcadia Publishing to purchase your copy of Green-Wood Cemetery.
Announcements
Quoting Death in Early Modern England: The Poetics of Epitaphs Beyond the Tomb By Scott L. Newstok
An innovative study of the Renaissance practice of making epitaphic gestures within other English genres. A poetics of quotation uncovers the ways in which writers including Shakespeare, Marlowe, Holinshed, Sidney, Jonson, Donne, and Elizabeth I have recited these texts within new contexts. Visit Palgrave Macmillan and purchase your copy today!
Living by the Dead By Ellen Ashdown with illustrations by Mary Liz Moody.
A memoir about living beside a cemetery--and about the members of my family who came to rest at Roselawn Cemetery in Tallahassee, Florida. Please visit Kitsune Books for more information.
Graveyards of Chicago: The People, History, Art, and Lore of Cook County Cemeteries By Matt Hucke And Ursula Bielski.
Discover a Chicago That Exists Just Beneath the Surface - About Six Feet Under! Take a tour of Chicago's permanent residents! Please visit the Lake Claremont Press website to purchase your copy of Graveyards of Chicago today!
Epitaphs: The Magazine for Cemetery Lovers By Cemetery Lovers
For information regarding subscriptions, single issues, submission guidelines, deadlines, classifieds or advertising for future issues, please visit The Cemetery Club.
Guardians of the Soul: Angels and Innocents, Mourners and Saints with photography by John Bower and foreword by Claude Cookman
Indiana's remarkable cemetery sculpture is now available. Please visit Studio Indiana for more information.
West Springfield Massachusetts: Stories Carved in Stone by Rusty Clark
Features information on early New England gravestone carvers with more than two hundred photos and illustrations. Please visit the Dog Pond Press website.
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On a scholarly hunt for bad old Vlads tomb |
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Written by DeadGirl
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Tuesday, 12 July 2005 |
The Historian
By Elizabeth Kostova
Little, Brown. 647 pp. $25.95
Reviewed by Susan Balée
In The Historian, Elizabeth Kostova's first novel, history lives, and so does Dracula - Vlad the Impaler to you - who's been pursued down the centuries by a motley assortment of monks, archivists, historians, and precocious graduate students.
In the best 19th-century tradition of Bram Stoker (whose Dracula serves as the seminal text here), the story is told mostly through letters and memoirs. Documentation is everything to these protagonists and many "Aha!" moments occur when one vampire seeker shows another an important manuscript.
After all, texts endure and flesh does not (except for undead flesh). As one of the narrators writes to his "dear and unfortunate successor": There is survival and survival, the historian learns to his grief. The very worst impulses of humankind can survive generations, centuries, even millennia. And the best of our individual efforts can die with us at the end of a single lifetime.
Therefore, in The Historian, scholars who might be at each other's throats in a typical academic setting are trying to spare each other's throats in this one. Knowledge is power, and all the eggheaded heroes of this novel share knowledge and ideas in their quest for the evil prince.
Happily for the reader, our narrators must travel to many exotic locales in search of bad old Vlad's tomb. The descriptions of the Slovenian Alps, the South of France, and Istanbul, Turkey, are magnificent. Kostova has provided readers with a marvelous travelogue of all the important sites of the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires. Everything you ever wanted to know about the history, politics, religion, architecture and art of these places is woven skillfully into the story.
The main narrator comes to Philadelphia to visit what locals will recognize as the Rosenbach Museum & Library. Insofar as this fine little "Museum of the Book" houses Bram Stoker's original notebooks on Dracula, it's a natural place to set a scene of this novel. After all, Stoker did the major research on vampires before he wrote his classic. He's the guy who got the goods on garlic, crosses, stakes through the heart, etc. And Kostova, like Hollywood, does not deviate from the folklore. Culture resides in a country's language, literature, folk beliefs, and food, and the author serves heaping helpings of all of them: Yogurt with cucumber and skewered, grilled meats, coffee and pastries rolled in honey and almonds flavor the scenes set in Turkey; layered potatoes and salami, stews of every sort, warm goat's milk, a strong liqueur made of apricots called "palinka," and pancakes filled with veal add gusto to the scenes set in Eastern Europe.
One character informs us: "Coffee has a tragic history in Budapest." It seems that in 1541, the invader Suleyman II invited a local general to a sumptuous meal in his tent. After the Hungarian general had finished eating and was enjoying the first cup of coffee he'd ever tasted, Suleyman told him that the Turkish troops had captured Buda Castle while they were dining. The character adds, "You can imagine how bitter that coffee tasted."
The only character who doesn't seem hungry enough is Vlad himself. The real man's cruelty is legendary - reputedly, he impaled about 14,000 of his own citizens, in addition to every Turkish enemy he could capture. He liked to torture people; he loved to watch them die. Yet when readers finally meet him in the novel, he seems almost courtly, an out-of-style old scholar who spends too much time alone with books. He even tells one of the academics he's captured, "I became an historian in order to preserve my own history forever." In short, he's nothing like the raging hemoholics in Anne Rice's novels. Far from being an addict desperate to get a fix, he exercises restraint: The wounds he leaves on most of his victims' throats are rather dainty - more like hickeys than ripped jugulars - and a mere trickle of dried blood stains his own little mustache.
Fortunately, Vlad's somewhat anemic portrayal doesn't diminish the overall force of the novel. That's because in The Historian, the journey matters more than the ultimate destination. So, sit back and enjoy the lush writing (infinitely superior to the hackneyed prose of The Da Vinci Code), the intellectual suspense, the clever plot and the likable protagonists. Elizabeth Kostova is a first-rate writer and she's earned her laurels with this debut.
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/magazine/daily/12109697.htm |
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