A brisk and richly detailed history of a significant place.
Drawing on a burgeoning of recent research and scholarship, as well as memoirs and chronicles, Jones (History/Queen Mary Univ. and Univ. of Chicago; The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth Century Paris, 2014, etc.) creates an adroit overview of the transformation of Versailles from a rustic hunting lodge to France’s most sumptuous palace.
In the 1610s, the “shy, ungregarious and mildly misogynistic” Louis XIII, embroiled in religious conflicts, urban upheaval, and war, retreated to the unremarkable village of Versailles, where he surrounded himself with fellow hunters. Although he expanded his lodge a bit over the years until it resembled a country house, it was his son, Louis XIV, who turned the residence into a palace, relocating his court and government there. Dependent on fluctuating funds from the royal treasury, Louis devoted himself to micromanaging extensive renovation, expanding, modernizing (including bathrooms and portable porcelain stoves) and decorating, choosing as his personal motif the sun, “giver of life and centre of the universe.” His focus went beyond the main house to its sweeping gardens and to a château—“a more relaxed retreat for him and a select group of his closest courtiers”—five miles away, which became known as the Grand Trianon. For more than 50 years, Jones reports, “Versailles was probably the biggest building site in Europe.” It was also a site teeming with people: around 3,000 who lodged in the palace, several additional thousands who came for the day or lodged elsewhere, and tens of thousands of servants who resided in the town. The author recounts the fate of Versailles under Louis XIV’s heirs, who preferred glittering cultural life in Paris, and after the French Revolution, when Versailles was perceived as a glorification of the despised monarchy. Every successive regime—monarchy, empire, and republic—redefined the meaning, use, and relevance of Versailles. Private philanthropy and public support for France’s national heritage has ensured that Versailles endures as a “world-historical site of memory” and repository of history, art, and culture.
A brisk and richly detailed history of a significant place.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5416-7338-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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