A useful reference about famous and relatively overlooked figures of English history.
A comprehensive historical work about how royal mistresses, wives and queens influenced and helped shape the future of Britain from the Dark Ages to the present.
Neatly and logically packaged into separate sections, this history of more than 3,000 years of English royalty delves into the little-known and offbeat details about the women on the throne—as well as those near it, and those in the royal beds. Lehman (Lives of England’s Monarchs, 2005, etc.) gives a straightforward summary of each of the 41 monarchs’ reigns, analyzes the importance of the women involved, and discusses the stability and success of the various marriages and liaisons. Religion, mostly bitterness between Catholics and Protestants, dominates the blood-soaked rivalries of the first 1,500 years. Women were fair game to the executioner’s ax, sometimes justifiably but often unjustly; the reign of Henry VIII predictably gets the most pages. The book’s tone is sometimes simplistic, but the narrative keeps the reader’s attention with intriguing details. For example, Richard II and his queen, Anne of Bohemia, brought in the Sumptuary Laws, which dictated how the different social classes could dress; the aim seemed to be to stop the peasants from being upwardly mobile. Queen Caroline, Lehman writes, was the power behind George II’s support of the music of composer George Frideric Handel. The king was so impressed by the “Hallelujah Chorus” in Handel’s “Messiah” during a 1743 performance that he stood up—a tradition that has continued to this day. American Wallis Simpson comes in for her share of scrutiny, with Lehman agreeing with many historians that Simpson was genuinely prepared to end her controversial affair with Edward VIII. The English people hated her, and she returned their feelings with equal measure: “I hate this country and shall hate it to my grave,” she said. However, Lehman doesn’t mention one serious political aspect of the affair: The country and the empire were so absorbed in the scandal that they were distracted from the rise of Nazi Germany.
A useful reference about famous and relatively overlooked figures of English history.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-1463430566
Page Count: 720
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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