A surprisingly light-footed look at fundamental questions of authority and identity.
Ravel (History/MIT) grapples skillfully with a slippery cause célèbre involving imposture and bigamy in the closing years of Louis XIV’s reign.
Why would an aristocrat abandon his noble status, his well-heeled wife and all they afforded him in 17th-century France to marry an innkeeper’s daughter and pass himself off as a commoner? Examining the curious case of Louis de la Pivardière, aka Dubouchet, Ravel delves into the creaking structure of aristocratic privilege, identity and jurisprudence in a period of theological and intellectual uncertainty. Born in Berry, the youngest son of a nobleman, Louis was “essentially disinherited” and joined the army; in 1687 he married Marguerite Chauvelin, a landowning widow with six children. For eight years they lived on her rural estate, though Louis was frequently absent to seek a commissioned post in the army. During the spring of 1695, while staying in Auxerre, he met the teenage Marie Pillard and married her, subsequently siring several children. When Louis made a visit to Marguerite in 1697, news of his bigamy had reached her. They quarreled, and he repeated rumors that she was carrying on with the head of the local priory. Louis disappeared the same night, and maidservants who saw or overheard something claimed that Marguerite had killed him. However, no body was found, and a man who seemed to be Louis was later hauled before the Palais de Justice. Ravel wades through a dizzying array of testimony about the putative murder and parses Parisian magistrates’ exhaustive attempts to ascertain whether the prisoner before them was indeed Louis and Marguerite should be exonerated. In the end, Attorney General Henri-François d’Aguesseau disentangled the threads sufficiently to allow the court to reach a verdict, though not to allay all doubts. Spinoff stage plays ensured that the scandal attained the status of legend. Ravel enlists similar cases (e.g., Martin Guerre) to enrich his engrossing comparative study.
A surprisingly light-footed look at fundamental questions of authority and identity.Pub Date: July 10, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-618-19731-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2008
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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