Carefully introduced, bite-sized portions of classic Irish narratives. (2 maps, 16-page color insert not seen)
An anthology of two dozen ancient texts whose protagonists are the icons of Irish culture.
Arranged chronologically, the stories form a general history of Ireland up to 1601, when the kings (who numbered up to 150 and were selected by politics rather than ancestry) lost power. McCullough (Chronicles of the Barbarians, 1998, etc.) connects the selections with explanations of their historical context and introductions to the authors. Thomas Kinsella translates the seventh-century poem “The Cattle Raid of Cooley,” in which Cuchulain protects the valuable brown bull of Cooley against Medb’s attacking army. In the eighth-century tale “Palace of the Quicken Tree,” Finn McCool is tricked and trapped in the palace by the treacherous Midac. Dying there of an evil spell, Finn is saved by Dermat O’Dyna, who kills the three kings of the Island of Torment and brings their heads to Finn to set him free. The two best stories come from the twelfth-century epic “The War of the Irish and the Vikings.” Around 842, Turgeis, “the Genghis Khan of the Vikings,” lays waste to Ireland, separating mother from daughter and father from son. Later, Brian Boru retaliates at the battle of Clontarf, near Dublin. In a lively home-team narrative, Boru, son Murchadh, and grandson Tordhelbach lead an attack on the evil Vikings; Murchadh kills 50 of them with each hand before the three Boru men die. Two accounts by Gerald of Wales and an excellent poem from 1225, “The Song of Dermot and the Earl,” dramatize the meddling of the English in Irish politics. McCullough concludes with three stories of the Battle of Kinsale, where in 1601 the Spanish came to aid the Irish fight the English. Fynes Moryson’s diary records the English view of the siege and the uncoordinated Irish-Spanish effort that led to defeat and the flight of Hugh O’Neill and Hugh O’Donnell, last of the powerful Irish kings.
Carefully introduced, bite-sized portions of classic Irish narratives. (2 maps, 16-page color insert not seen)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8129-3233-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2000
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 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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