Lowney’s treatment is less fluent than María Rosa Menocal’s Ornament of the World (2002), but still of much interest to...
A thoughtful visit to medieval Spain, where Christians, Jews, and Muslims once lived side by side—and the Muslims were in charge.
The Visigothic rulers of post–Roman Spain were great warriors and reasonably able administrators. Still, writes Lowney (Heroic Leadership, 2003), they ushered in “the economic and cultural stagnation that later historians dubbed the Dark Ages” even as they promulgated anti-Semitic laws that punished a people who, some historians hazard, were in Spain even before Christianity took root. Then came the year 711, when 10,000 Moorish soldiers swiftly conquered most of the Iberian peninsula, establishing Muslim rule over five million inhabitants and instituting a government that extended more or less equal rights to all. In the golden age that ensued (which is not to be confused with the golden age of Phillip II), Spain became a center of learning and culture as encyclopedists and mathematicians filled the plazas of Granada and Seville; al-Andalus taught the future Pope Gerbert how to do his numbers and allowed the courtier and poet Samuel ha-Nagid to become “the most extraordinarily accomplished Jew not only in Spain but anywhere in medieval Christendom, and one of the most accomplished in any era in European history.” Though religious and ethnic tensions were far from unknown during the eight centuries of Muslim rule, fraternity was the order of the day; Lowney cites, for instance, legal records recording the aftermath of interfaith bouts of drinking and carousing, when partiers of all faiths wound up in the hoosegow to sleep it off. Other kinds of mixing exercised the wrath of the Catholic hierarchy outside Spain, and when the Muslims were finally driven from Iberia in 1492—and Jews who refused to convert expelled immediately thereafter—those Spaniards who advocated the view that ecumenicalism was possible were tortured and burned at the stake for their trouble.
Lowney’s treatment is less fluent than María Rosa Menocal’s Ornament of the World (2002), but still of much interest to those seeking evidence that we can, in fact, all get along.Pub Date: April 6, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-4359-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
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
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
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