Still, the author provides a helpful chronicle of the traditions we hailed from and happily rebelled against.
A broad narrative history of British wealth and opulence since the Norman Conquest.
James (The Middle Class: A History) effectively digests an entire millennium of British aristocracy, from the cult of chivalry to the creaking irrelevance of peers hanging on by their gilded toenails in today’s House of Lords. The word “Great” in the title gives a notion of where the author stands: “Who or what will replace these men and women?” he writes. “The extinction of the Lords would create a vacuum in public life and a dangerous one.” They have served, above all, as a check on the sovereign’s power, strictures clearly set out in 1215 in the Magna Carta, which safeguarded inalienable rights and protected “freemen” from excessive, arbitrary taxation. The contract held the king to account, and a bicameral parliament ensued, containing an inherited House of Lords and elected members in the House of Commons. With myriad examples, James traces how the “great men of the realm,” namely aristocrats, would invoke that right to check the king, especially during the civil and religious wars. The creation of the Whigs, rebellious hotheads, and Tories, submissive to authority, occurred at this 17th-century juncture. But the power of the aristocrats, resting on landownership before the advent of the Industrial Revolution, was undergirded by the approval of the masses, who might also rise up (as in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381), or ape their masters, as demonstrated by the mores of the growing middle class. Most important, the aristocrats created a cultural legacy of grand homes, taste, fashion, art and sports. James attends to all the necessary historical strands, some of which American readers may find difficult to swallow.
Still, the author provides a helpful chronicle of the traditions we hailed from and happily rebelled against.Pub Date: July 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-61545-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2010
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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