A tour de force of scholarship that begins with a gradual and accessible buildup and then descends, like the century, into a...
Greengrass (Emeritus, Early Modern History/Univ. of Sheffield; Living with Religious Diversity in Early Modern Europe, 2009, etc.) reaches deeply behind the early myth of a united Europe.
The author focuses on the period of intensive religious conflicts that tore Catholic Europe apart from the advent of Lutheranism to the execution of King Charles I in England. The late-medieval sense of “Christendom” was more a “reflexive construction” than a reality, a geographical conglomeration of parishes across the landmass that owed their affiliation to the Holy Roman Empire, headed by Charles V from 1520 to 1555, the last emperor to be invested by the papacy. For the masses of mostly rural dwellers, social cohesion was determined by a foundation of material stability via hugely diverse patterns of habitation, marriage and family, diet (the Columbian Exchange had introduced more staples into the European diet, yet infant mortality and death by disease remained very high), agricultural systems, debt, laws of inheritance and an intermittent simmering of popular protest. Silver and gold from the New World spurred growing military conflicts among the European dynasties: the enriched Spanish monarchy, France’s emergent absolutist Bourbon state, and the Netherlands’ financial revolution that guaranteed the debts of the Habsburg overlords. Yet while “Christendom’s belief-community” was held loosely together by its sense of “orthodoxy, genealogy, inheritance and knowledge,” the threat exposing its fragility was not the Ottoman incursions but rather its own internal religious fissures. Greengrass devotes most of the second half of this hefty, scholarly study to these “conflicts in the name of God,” from the German states to Poland-Lithuania to France, Spain and Britain.
A tour de force of scholarship that begins with a gradual and accessible buildup and then descends, like the century, into a convulsion of dynastic entanglements.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-0670024568
Page Count: 752
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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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