Everything you ever wanted to know—and perhaps much you could do without—about Regency life.
British historian Mortimer, who has already struck gold with delightful guides to Elizabethan and medieval Britain, takes on the Regency.
The Regency period lasted from 1811 to 1820 when Prince George ruled instead of his mentally ill father, George III. Mortimer rewinds the clock to 1789, when the prince became regent-in-waiting after his father “fell ill.” The author ends with George’s (by then, George IV) death in 1830, an event greeted with contemptuous obituaries in major newspapers. “In marked contrast to his father,” writes Mortimer, “George IV [was] one of the laziest…spoilt, arrogant, self-indulgent, profligate, uncaring and conceited Englishmen ever to have lived.” Despite his unpopularity, he had a few positive qualities, which the author enumerates, and he exerted intense influence over his time. “You can see why those who looked back from the 1860s saw their Regency forebears as an unfettered and wild bunch….It had been a time when gentlemen and ladies, beggars and clergymen, soldiers and tramps, employers and courtesans could all pretty much behave as they saw fit, in a world that gleamed with gold and heroism, drink and sex, excitement and opportunity.” Expanding the period to include the prince’s entire adult life provides a wider canvas for Mortimer’s deliciously revealing research, but there’s no denying that the pace of change during these four decades leads to not one but several “periods,” so the author must provide as much political as social history. No reader should miss his take on the era’s hygiene, diet, medicine, treatment of women, fashion, travel, theater, and music. There was even a musical superstar: Beethoven. Anglophiles will love it all, but Americans without at least a tourist’s familiarity with British geography (especially London) will struggle through the author’s descriptions of the growth and makeup of cities. It’s an avalanche of streets, monuments, districts, parks, palaces, and great houses.
Everything you ever wanted to know—and perhaps much you could do without—about Regency life.Pub Date: April 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64313-881-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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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