A historian’s history that deserves pride of place in every library.
Historian and journalist Jones (Countdown to Valkyrie: The July Plot to Kill Hitler, 2008, etc.) enlightens and delights in this history of the London Tower.
The author begins with tales of William the Conquerer, whose “motte-and-bailey” forts could be erected “within a week.” The stone Tower of London, on the other hand, became the center of power and residence for the English royalty through Elizabeth I. The buildings surrounding the White Tower served not only as royal pomp, but also as the armory, where blacksmiths forged swords, fletchers made arrows and weaponry was stored, including gunpowder (a near disaster during the Great Fire of 1666). After King John lost the crown jewels in the Wash estuary, his son Henry III ruled that their replacements be kept in the Tower at all times. During his reign, Henry expanded the buildings, centralized the Mint and established the Royal Menagerie, which delighted visitors for 600 years, until the Duke of Wellington expelled the animals to the newly built London Zoo in Regent’s Park. Jones enumerates the many who lost their heads, as well as the many prisoners who suffered little and accomplished much—e.g., Walter Raleigh, who wrote The History of the World during his 13 years there. There were also many who left behind heartfelt letters to family, most notably Thomas More. Jones offers a wealth of interesting tidbits, including the story of one escapee who carved tools and blackened them with polish.
A historian’s history that deserves pride of place in every library.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-62296-1
Page Count: 464
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
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 Yorkerstaff 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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