Author Elizabeth Kostova’s unusual debut novel combines her ten years of scholarly research on Vlad Tepes, the Impaler of Wallachia, sometimes known as Drakulya, with the stories that have become part of local folklore in Bulgaria and Rumania, and the legends created and perpetuated by Bram Stoker (in his novel Dracula). A sadistic prince from the mid-fifteenth century who killed up to 15,000 of his own people, often impaling them on stakes and leaving them to die horrible deaths, Vlad terrified his enemies from the Ottoman Empire, though it was Stoker who created the belief that he was a vampire. Three people from the twentieth century, all of whom have studied Drakulya and his history, tell interlocking stories here through letters, archived research documents, scholarly lectures, and their own experiences. All believe that Drakulya still walks the earth, selecting his acolytes and spreading his evil through bites on the neck, which leave them “undead.
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Purporting to be the “Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc: By the Sieur Louis de Conte (her page and secretary),” this work by Mark Twain is also his most scholarly, having taken twelve years to write. Clearly fascinated by Joan’s “voices” and her sense of mission, Twain delves into her religious passion and her belief that God has chosen her to free France from England and restore the Dauphin to the throne. Often focusing on the arguments and trials in which Joan participates throughout her life, Twain shows her childhood attempt to “save the fairies,” her struggle to become general of France, and ultimately, her defense against heresy and sorcery. Through these, Twain attempts to reconcile her spiritual commitment with the tumultuous temporal world in which she is engaged. A fast-paced story about a complex period.
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In describing the excavation of a junk which sank off the north coast of Viet Nam in the mid-fifteenth century, author Frank Pope focuses on the people who engage in excavation work–the maritime archaeologist vs. the treasure hunter, the financiers who supply the funds that make underwater excavation possible, the looters (often fishermen) who damage sites, the academics who engage in fierce competition for recognition within the field, and the divers, who have to live underwater in small, pressurized containers for over a month at a time. A complete account sure to interest serious marine archaeologists, art historians, and those seeking the inside story of how one plans and conducts major maritime archaeological projects, the book is longer on detail than action, but still fascinating.
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With his clever title implying simultaneously Gutenberg’s justification of his life as it nears its end, his judgment by posterity, and a typesetter’s spacing of words so that both left and right margins are even, Blake Morrison sets the tone for this fascinating story about Johann Gutenberg and his development of the first printing press. The invention most responsible for the spread of knowledge from the mid-fifteenth century till the development of the computer, the printing press was a far more clandestine and potentially subversive invention than one might imagine, and its creation was fraught with peril, financially, legally, and intellectually.
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