A turning point in English history, skillfully distilled for readers four centuries after.
Or, a year of living dangerously in England for champions of the Tudor line, would-be pirates, and civilians susceptible to a touch of the plague.
Many a noted British historian, such as Tudor specialist G.R. Elton, has passed the year 1603 by without much comment, thinking it no more important than any other 12-month period. London-based freelance writer/historian Lee (The Sceptred Isle, not reviewed), undaunted, makes a case for that year as one of those previously unheralded watersheds in the history of the British Isles. After all, it marked the death of Queen Elizabeth and the inauguration of the Scottish King James VI, who became James I of England and set about making all sorts of controversial steps and missteps and opening up the path to civil war later in the 17th century; as Lee writes, “Elizabeth may have commanded the obedience of the people, but James would not—and nor would any sovereign who followed.” Complicating James’s uneasy ascent to the throne was the return of the Black Death, which felled 40,000 English men, women, and children in 1603; it was less catastrophic than previous episodes of the plague, but an added burden in a time of hunger, want, and economic distress. Against this backdrop, Lee populates his stage with vivid characters, including the none-too-pleasant James himself; a rising star named William Shakespeare; and the privateer, ne’er-do-well, and poet Walter Ralegh, whom English writers and historians have lately been discovering. Though Lee falls for a classic schoolboy-Latin trap (“O rare Ben Johnson” has nothing to do with the poet’s uncommonness) and seems sometimes to be channeling a period ghostwriter (“The people of James’s green and pleasant land would prosper and breed as they might anyway have done”), his narrative moves well and neatly weaves many threads.
A turning point in English history, skillfully distilled for readers four centuries after.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-32139-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
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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