A witty and revealing look at long-term patterns in British history.
A British historian takes a long view of events that are now rattling the Isles.
“The British…seem like a people who have done things the same way for centuries and can be relied on for stability and common sense,” writes Reynolds (International History/Christ’s Coll., Cambridge; The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century, 2015, etc.), which explains why Brexit has seemed so inexplicable to so many people. In many ways, however, it is of a piece with previous episodes that stretch back at least 1,000 years, not simply in tensions between the U.K. and European alliances, but also in Britain’s relationships with the principalities of old. The isolation that logically results from living on an island was reinforced when Britain had to go it alone after the fall of France in 1940 until forging alliances with the U.S. and the Soviet Union, which Reynolds provocatively writes, “such was the extent of Germany’s early success in 1940 that the Führer had, in effect, called the superpowers into existence to redress the balance of the Old World.” The U.K. was not among these superpowers, leading to a sense of “declinism” that became a powerful counterargument to Britain’s previous championing of what the author deems an “ideology of freedom [that] was real at the time and has exerted a lasting influence.” With declinism, marked by episodes such as Margaret Thatcher’s being outplayed by continental colleagues such as François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl, has come another spate of that going-it-alone resignation. Reynolds peppers an always interesting text with side notes on things such as the relative lack of much of a dent, in terms of DNA, of the Norman conquest on the British Isles. He also offers some nice snark about some of the current players on the historical stage, among them Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn, who “seemed even less qualified for his job than May was for hers.”
A witty and revealing look at long-term patterns in British history.Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5416-4692-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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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