A nutritious but heavy loaf that lacks the leavening of felicity.
In sturdy but ordinary prose, a freelance historian tells the complicated story of the war that took the life of Lord Byron and freed Greece from Ottoman rule.
Brewer (a one-time classics scholar with a half-century’s interest in Greece) debuts with a thorough, if occasionally sluggish, account of a struggle that ultimately involved the great powers of Europe and consumed virtually all of the 1820s. After the Turks captured Constantinople in 1453, Brewer argues, “Greece became a small, poor and backward part of this great empire. . . . ” It was principally the Christian church that enabled the Greeks to keep their dwindling sense of national identity. By the early 19th century, time was ripe for talk of liberation to become action. In September 1814, three Greeks founded a secret society to foment the uprising they hoped would result in liberation. Brewer confidently guides us through the seven complex years before hostilities erupted in March 1821. At first the Greeks were out-gunned, out-shipped, and out-manned, but a number of early victories greatly improved morale—and encouraged foreign investors and sundry philhellenes to adopt the Greek cause. (One young idealist who showed up to fight was a Spanish girl dressed as a man.) Brewer does not withhold the full measure of gore: Following their victory at Chios, for example, the Turks sent a grisly shipment of Greek heads and ears to Constantinople. Brewer devotes several interesting chapters to the intertwined stories of Lord Byron and his friend Edward John Trelawny (the latter snatched Shelley’s heart from the funeral pyre in 1822 and later barely survived an assassination attempt in a Greek stronghold). And Brewer, ever in command of his facts, explains the effects of sizable British loans, the attempt to forge a constitution and find a king; he relates, as well, the world’s last major naval battle involving ships powered only by the wind.
A nutritious but heavy loaf that lacks the leavening of felicity.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2001
ISBN: 1-58567-172-X
Page Count: 393
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
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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