Far-ranging, fluent, and thoughtful—of considerable interest to students of history writ large, and not just of Europe.
A thorough survey of the European continent in the time between antiquity and modernity.
Traditionally, the Middle Ages are said to begin with the fall of Rome. As to the period’s end, some have placed it as late as the arrival of Columbus to Hispaniola, some a century before. Wickham (Medieval History/Univ. of Oxford), author of the excellent survey The Inheritance of Rome (2009), has little interest in precisely setting the dates or connecting modern outcomes to past causes. “History is not teleological: that is to say, historical development does not go to; it goes from,” he writes. What it goes from is a time when the Roman Empire splintered into smaller, more local states that would occasionally be gathered into later efforts at empire—the one of Charlemagne, for instance, namesake of an era whose leaders “presided over the largest-scale attempt to rethink politics in the whole of the middle ages.” There were advantages to smallness and localism; the Saxons, for instance, were difficult to subdue “because they were not a unitary people,” whereas post-Saxon England, more unified in that sense, was relatively easy to rule, “cohesive and densely governed.” Along the way, Wickham examines modern misunderstandings, particularly about medieval politics. Though many systems were parliamentary in name, he observes, parliaments tended to serve the monarch and not the people, though the people were many—as he notes, most medieval people were bound to subsistence agriculture, the peasantry as polity. In keeping with his earlier work, the Roman Empire is a constant reference for both Wickham and the people themselves; as he writes, “one thing which remained constant throughout the middle ages was the importance of the old Roman imperial frontier.” In a very real way, teleology aside, the modern world is framed by the divisions within and limits of Rome, whose influence, Wickham chronicles, was felt in other ways far beyond the time of the last emperor.
Far-ranging, fluent, and thoughtful—of considerable interest to students of history writ large, and not just of Europe.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-300-20834-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
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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