A fascinating look at the human impulse to protect and defend homes, communities, and nations.
How castles and other fortified buildings have helped shape history for thousands of years.
Jones draws from his work as an author (Powers and Thrones, 2021, etc.) and podcaster (This is History: A Dynasty to Die For) for this entertaining, fact-filled history of fortifications. As he writes, the book “takes a broad view on what a castle was—and is. At its core is a series of chapters about the castles of Western Europe during the Middle Ages. But it also examines the castle’s origins in the fortified cities that emerged during the Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean.” He describes the work as “a personal tour of castles I have encountered.” It’s an expansive tour, beginning with King Priam’s impenetrable community of Troy—until it was penetrated by Greeks who entered the citadel hidden in a certain horse. The walls of Jericho (“for thousands of years…the tallest structure on Earth”), the Iron Age hillforts of Britannia, the Viking Ring fortresses of Denmark, the Tower of London, the Great Wall of the Ming dynasty—these and more are vividly described in a breezy, absorbing writing style that’s buttressed by meticulous research. Jones also includes some “fantasy castles”—buildings that helped inspire works of fiction, including The Castle of Otranto, considered the first gothic novel. A chapter on American castles details Biltmore House, a 250-room mansion built by a scion of the Vanderbilt family, and publisher William Randolph Hearst’s San Simeon castle. Writing about the “nuclear age,” the author cites Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg’s underground shelter in Hawaii as an example of “doom-prepping.” For those less monetarily endowed, there are bunkers for sale—at $55,000 a pop—on the former Black Hills Army Base in South Dakota. “You can create a very chic glamping bunker on a barebones budget,” reads the spot’s marketing literature. “Think of it like you’re preparing for a long camping trip, albeit under a concrete and steel structure that will protect you from everything outside.”
A fascinating look at the human impulse to protect and defend homes, communities, and nations.Pub Date: tomorrow
ISBN: 9798217060306
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 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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