Highly accessible history, full of illuminating asides on such things as the world’s most famous diamond, the perils of...
A thoroughgoing study of India’s golden age, questioning the utility of golden ages and warning that tradition, “however glorious, is what a people have to grow out of.”
Madras-based magazine editor and historian Eraly has an obvious fondness for the glory days of India’s Mughal period, an era that lasted less than two centuries but led to such astonishing monuments as the Taj Mahal and even a few moments of peace among the loosely knit country’s religious factions. The first of the Mughal rulers, a descendant of both Timur the Lame and Genghis Khan, had the imposing birth name of Zahiruddin Muhammad (Muhammad, defender of the faith) but was known as Babur, “Tiger.” His vast army swept across much of northern India by way of Persia and Afghanistan, establishing an Indian throne in 1526; his subsequent war on a Rajput-Afghan alliance turned on a fine, almost legendary moment in which the hard-drinking, opium-smoking king renounced such things, returned to Islam, and built a fine pillar of the severed heads of his enemies. His son Humayun succeeded Babur and impressed those around him with a gentleness so thorough that he wept while doing in members of his own family; alas, poor Humayun on his robe while praying and cracked his head open. Next was Akbar, who embellished the Mughal throne with a religion meant to transcend Islam and Hinduism and exalt the Mughals in the bargain; opium and wine ended his rule. And so on. While Eraly admits to being something of a moral historian, he is quick to note that the flawed, all-too-human, all-too-hedonistic Mughals actually got some things done, including the political unification of much of the subcontinent and the establishment of an Islamic state that was generally secular until the time of the last Mughal emperor, whose orthodoxy helped bring about the end of the dynasty.
Highly accessible history, full of illuminating asides on such things as the world’s most famous diamond, the perils of eating too much saffron, and the cupidity of medieval mullahs.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2005
ISBN: 0-75381-758-6
Page Count: 555
Publisher: Orion/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
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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