A remarkable tale that might have fallen from the inventive lips of Scheherazade. (3 maps, 47 illustrations)
Popular historian Milton (The Riddle and the Knight, 2001, etc.) returns with another page-turner: a chronicle of the actual events underlying James Clavell’s novel Shogun (1975).
Milton has the knack for pointing out in history’s vast tapestry those portions we most want to stare at. This time we follow the remarkable William Adams, an English mariner, navigator, and pilot who spent nearly two years at sea, suffered horrific deprivations, and watched the vast majority of his shipmates die before he and a handful of other survivors arrived on April 12, 1600, in Japan, a land so unknown that its existence barely surpassed the status of rumor. The Japanese promptly tossed Adams in prison for six weeks while they considered whether to execute the foreigners. But local potentate Tokugawa Ieyasu was intrigued by their ship and spared its mariners so he could learn as much as possible about their crude, uncivilized European ways. Adams rapidly rose in Ieyasu’s estimation: he learned to speak Japanese fluently, mastered the arcane intricacies of courtly behavior, and quickly established himself as a trusted advisor. Soon, he went native, dressing in Japanese fashion, marrying a local woman (back home, his English wife scratched for farthings), amassing a small fortune in land and other investments. Adams also mastered the difficult and dangerous choreography of political intrigue, as Jesuits, Franciscans, and the rival Dutch and Spanish constantly vied for attention and power in Japan. Adams remained for the rest of his life—some 20 years. Milton does a masterful job of conveying the wonder with which each culture beholds the other: the Japanese cannot believe how filthy and ill-mannered and horny the Europeans are; the English and Dutch stare slack-jawed at the casual Japanese brutality.
A remarkable tale that might have fallen from the inventive lips of Scheherazade. (3 maps, 47 illustrations)Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2003
ISBN: 0-374-25385-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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