Secrets, Lies, and Consequences

A Great Scholar's Hidden Past and His Protégé's Unsolved Murder

By: Bruce Lincoln

Narrated by: Tom Beyer

In 1991, Ioan Culianu was on the precipice of a brilliant academic career. Culianu had fled his native Romania and established himself as a widely admired scholar at just forty-one years old. He was teaching at the University of Chicago Divinity School where he was seen as the heir apparent to his mentor, Mircea Eliade, a fellow Romanian expatriate and the founding father of the field of religious studies, who had died a few years earlier. When Culianu began to receive threatening messages, he asked a colleague to hold onto some papers for safekeeping. A week later someone fired a bullet into the back of his head, killing him instantly. The case was never solved, though the prevailing theory is that Culianu was targeted by the Romanian secret police as a result of critical articles he wrote after the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu.

What was in those papers and what connection might they have to Culianu's death? The papers eventually passed into the hands of Bruce Lincoln, and their story is at the heart of this book. The documents were English translations of articles that Eliade wrote in the 1930s, some of which voiced Eliade's support for the Iron Guard. Bruce Lincoln explores what the articles reveal about Eliade's past, his subsequent efforts to conceal that past, his complex relations with Culianu, and the possible motives for Culianu's shocking murder.

©2024 Oxford University Press (P)2023 Tantor

Interesting overall but...

The narrator has some probllems with the pronunciation of Romanian names and phrases. This should not be a problem for non-native speakers. Yet, at times, some phrases /words are in Romanian language only, w/o their English language equivalents. Again, a non-problem for Romanian speakers but an issue for those who don"t know Romanian. I assume/hope the printed version has some footnotes/endnotes clarifying such phrases/words. Also, I haven't been able to find and download the pdf/annex that is supposed to come with the audio version.

Scholarship and politics

Bruce Lincoln has written a thoroughly reseached exposeé of the dark politics of his old teacher as well as an exciting unraveling of the possible reasons for the assassination of his successor. Gripping. The reading is good even if the Romanian names strain the reader!

I just finished and want to start from the beginning again

This was so well done and absolutely fascinating. There’s so much depth. This is why I would actually like to just start at the beginning again because I know I didn’t catch everything. Bruce Lincoln does such a fantastic job and the story is complicated, emotional difficult. I will be thinking about this for a long time.