by Jeremy D. Popkin ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 10, 2019
A fresh, welcome new interpretation of the French Revolution.
A veteran chronicler of French history follows the wild-eyed forces that impelled the Revolution as well as the troubling aspects that kept them from meeting their goals.
Wisely, in order to help readers grasp the enormity of historical currents converging at this moment in the late 18th century, Popkin (Chair, History/Univ. of Kentucky; From Herodotus to H-Net: The Story of Historiography, 2015, etc.) uses two real characters to help illustrate his points. On one hand, Louis XVI was the “living symbol of the hereditary privileges and social inequalities the revolutionaries were determined to overturn.” He grew up to believe he was the country’s patriarch and that, as he said, “every profession contribute[ed], in its own way, to the support of the monarchy.” On the other hand, a young glazier named Jacques-Louis Ménétra would have been lumped into what became the powerful force of the “Third Estate”—i.e., everyone who was not royal or clergy. In contrast to the upper classes, who focused intently on maintaining the rigid status quo, commoners such as Ménétra seemed at the mercy of erratic fluctuations in received ideas from the press as well as yearly harvests, the whims of landlords, prices of food, and collective violence. Yet, as Popkin astutely points out, “even if few of them could read and write, peasants had a strong sense of their rights.” The growing crisis of the country’s bankruptcy, thanks in large part to Louis’ insistence on financing the American Revolution to spite rival England, meant forcing the king into reluctant, seesawing measures. The fomenting ideas of the Enlightenment, as epitomized in Diderot’s Encyclopédie (which Louis owned), were the same as those that spurred the Americans, but the outcome was violently different. The author underscores how the French example might have “foreshadowed totalitarian excesses more than social progress” and how liberty for some did not spell liberty for all, especially slaves and women.
A fresh, welcome new interpretation of the French Revolution.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-465-09666-4
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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