A tireless biography of the house first dubbed a gift to Queen Charlotte in 1763 and its transformations during nine generations of British monarchy. The politics of choosing an architect and designer are proportionate to appointing a successor to the British crown, according to Healey’s enormously detailed account of Buckingham Palace and the goings-on within, which will satisfry the most voracious Anglophile. Two hundred years of palatial minutiae are revealed through the lens of royal choices in aesthetics. Healey writes affectionately of the sovrreigns’ inspirations and idiosyncrasies, and although more is said of the royals and how they ruled than of the palace and how it stood, Healey valiantly chronicles each architectural reconstruction and takes every opportunity to link the dwellers to their home. “When King George came to the throne he inherited two immediate problems: the front of the Palace, which needed urgent attention, and the stormy passage of the Liberal government’s Parliament Bill, aimed at curbing the power of the Lords.” Indeed, it would seem every coronation led to an equal number of architectural and political concerns. Healey’s moderate doses of imagination lend poignancy to profiles, like his depiction of King George III’s patience with sculptor Joseph Nolleken’s pinching “his nose while measuring with his calipers” and Queen Victoria’s wish to be in spirit with her deceased, beloved Prince Albert “at breakfast under the trees at Frogmore” the morning of her Golden Jubilee. By the time the palace is bombed in WWII, Healey has made it sufficiently heroic, as proven by King George VI’s and Queen Elizabeth I’s determination to remain in their home, despite the invasion it suffers. Nine air attacks on the edifice takes on heartbreaking grandeur, thanks to Healey’s dramatic account of its well-being. A clever inclusion of architecture in the essence of English royal history.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-7867-0565-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1998
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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