An often muddled take on an intriguing era of clashing cultures.
Debut author Marshall offers a historical novel set during the time of Alfred the Great, the Anglo-Saxon king of Wessex in the late 9th century.
When a group of Vikings aims to lay siege to the village of Gains in what is now present-day Lincolnshire, England, it seems like a great pillage is about to take place. After all, the Vikings are fearless warriors of Odin, and what chance does a settlement have against such men of violence? As it turns out, the villagers manage to stage quite a routing. With the aid of a boy named Herd, who commands his dogs to harass the intruders, the townsfolk ultimately defeat the Norsemen with arrows and eggs filled with quicklime. As the Vikings fearfully flee back to their homeland, the victors back in England celebrate. A Welsh monk brings the news that King Alfred will soon be coming to the village to speak with the leader of Gains, AEthelred. Marshall goes on to weave a plot that includes King Alfred’s wedding and the rule of Viking king Harrad Bluetooth, shedding light on an oft-neglected period of European history. He frequently provides information on unfamiliar words, such as “Holliwells is Lincolnshire for a ‘holy wells,’ ” and details, such as an explanation of the process for turning goose eggs into weapons. However, the book’s bizarre penchant for question marks and awkward phrases (“Within any tribe, there’s only an infinite number of warrior class, from the group?”) makes for difficult reading. The author is clearly passionate about the period (“Historians force-feed students to believe Lincolnshire, was overrun by Vikings. Not so, both our folklore and the Viking Sagas, tell a different tale”), but that passion often translates into peculiar prose.
An often muddled take on an intriguing era of clashing cultures.Pub Date: July 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5150-1766-0
Page Count: 286
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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