A fresh perspective on the past.
Powerful pens.
From “Caedmon’s Hymn” (circa 730) to Zaffar Kunial’s “The Groundsman” (2022), University of London scholar Clarke traces 1,300 years of British history through verse—some familiar (John of Gaunt’s “This England,” from Shakespeare’s Richard II), some unfamiliar (an excerpt from the satirical “Crumble-Hall” by housemaid Mary Leapor. Major voices are represented, like Chaucer, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Lewis Carroll, and W.H. Auden, but Clarke’s compendium is wide-ranging as she considers poems that respond to political turmoil, plague, fire, invasions, court intrigue, and religious tensions, as well as social, political, and cultural changes: “repeated moments of doubt, catastrophe and reinvention in England’s past.” Each chapter offers richly detailed context and an astute close reading. Clarke sees The Battle of Maldon (a commemoration of a Viking incursion into England in 991), for example, as a contribution to the myth-making vital to the cohesiveness of a fledging nation. “What seems, at first, like timeless heroic verse,” she writes, “is in fact an excoriating critique of tenth-century English leadership, and a brilliant piece of propaganda.” The consequences of the Norman Conquest emerge in a verse obituary for William the Conqueror, which Clarke reads as poem of resistance and defiance. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale gives insights into women’s lives in medieval England; Browning’s wrenching “Cry of the Children” lays bare the horror of child labor. Clarke offers a compelling analysis of Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven” (1812), a prescient poem that depicts a desolate future for a nation at the height of its global power. The poem, Clarke argues, which served as “a message for readers—politicians, opinion-makers, thinkers—in her own present,” resonates in our own time. Discerning choices and incisive analyses amply support her contention that “all poems speak to multiple historical moments, have multiple lives and afterlives.”
A fresh perspective on the past.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2026
ISBN: 9798897101580
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
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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