Occasionally slow-going, but burbles with personalities and ideas of the Restoration age.
British historian Uglow (Nature’s Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick, 2007, etc.) attempts to organize the bemusing Stuart Restoration period into tidy compartments.
How did the son of the murdered tyrant Charles I return to England in triumph more than a decade after his father’s beheading, then stay securely in power for 25 years? The author considers the makeup of this singular historical character, a man both affable and canny, whose period in exile forced him to assume the persona of a regular nobleman, ingratiate himself in foreign capitals and open himself to new ideas. Charles was above all a performer in an age of masks, Uglow writes, a monarch on the cusp of the Enlightenment. The author divides her exploration of Charles’s kingly life into the four suits of a deck of cards—clubs, diamonds, hearts, spades—and depicts how he played each well or poorly: regulating constitutional issues, deciding the fate of the army, mollifying religious animosities, punishing the leaders of the regicide, rehabilitating Whitehall into a royal residence and juggling his new queen, the Portuguese Infanta Catherine, with his numerous mistresses. The categories grow rather messy, as plague and the London fire devastated the country during the decade. Moreover, Charles dragged the country into war with the Dutch and urged religious toleration probably out of his own Catholic sympathies, while impoverishing the country by keeping up with his cousin in France, Louis XIV. However, Charles was passionate about the theater, giving rise to the witty, ribald Restoration comedies of the period, and scientific inquiry, spurred by his childhood tutor Thomas Hobbes, thus establishing the Royal Society. Uglow provides a labored but ultimately entertaining view of the richly intricate tapestry of this era.
Occasionally slow-going, but burbles with personalities and ideas of the Restoration age.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-374-28137-3
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2009
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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