Of much interest to students of late medieval British history, though a glance at the 20-odd pages of charted royal lineages...
Lancasters, Yorkists, and appendices, oh my!
If you can read a history of the wars of Lancaster and York without being confused then you are in a small minority and probably have a degree in the subject. As it is, the conflict between contending bloodlines and their allies spills over into all sorts of events in the larger European context. In his first book to be published in America, former British intelligence officer Bicheno (Elizabeth's Sea Dogs: How the English Became the Scourge of the Seas, 2014, etc.) does very good work by personalizing some of that larger picture. For instance, he notes that a key figure in the proximate causes of war was the widow of the Duke of Bedford, who had married her so hastily after the death of his wife he lost a “crucial English ally in the endgame of the Hundred Years War.” Then there was King Henry VI, whose mother had set up house, unmarried, with Owen Tudor, introducing a name into English history that would soon be heard from again. Those striking personalities aside, Bicheno’s history of a bloody war among cousins is complex and sometimes tedious—not through any fault of his own but because the endless back and forth of royal and anti-royal factions is simply tiresome and wrapped in overelaborate but needed detail. A sentence such as, “it is not clear whether the first Lancastrian emissaries were sent after the duchesses arrived at St Albans, or crossed paths with them,” begs the question whether it matters. At its best, Bicheno’s book—the first volume of a history that will feature better-known figures than the early stirrings recounted here—is a fast-paced study of savage battles full of longbowmen and the equerry.
Of much interest to students of late medieval British history, though a glance at the 20-odd pages of charted royal lineages and ranking clergy will doubtless scare off casual readers.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68177-306-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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 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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