An extraordinary glimpse into a pivotal epoch in Western history.
A marvelously rendered tale of how one extended family helped shape, and was shaped by, the England and New England of the 1600s.
Intrepid seaman William Rainborowe was the patriarch of a family that, though not a household name, went on to have a definitive impact on the founding of Puritan New England and on the English civil war. Tinniswood (Pirates of Barbary: Corsairs, Conquests and Captivity in the Seventeenth-Century Mediterranean, 2010, etc.) chronicles the Rainborowe family history with both the loving care of a true historian and the wit and candor of a storyteller. His work is both a contribution to historical research and a window for the public into the 17th century. William Rainborowe battled piracy around Morocco and in the British Isles while also becoming a wealthy merchant and adviser to the government in naval affairs. Members of his Puritan family would settle in the Boston area in the Great Migration of the 1630s. Some would go on to crisscross the Atlantic again in search of commercial success or in order to take part in English politics. One daughter, Martha, would become the wife of John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Her brothers Thomas and William Junior were destined to be leading figures in the English civil war. In a story spanning three continents, nearly half a century and dozens of lives, Tinniswood ably keeps readers’ focus. His ability to weave the Rainborowe family tale into the larger tapestry of English and New England history will be appreciated by amateur and professional historians alike. In the end, it is easy for readers to agree with the author’s assessment: “The Rainborowes mattered. Not only because every life matters, but also because they were there at a moment when the world changed. And they helped it to change.”
An extraordinary glimpse into a pivotal epoch in Western history.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-465-02300-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
HISTORY | MODERN | UNITED STATES | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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