A solid, if staid, narrative of events once well-known throughout Europe, and now the province of a few specialists.
So Baron Munchausen lied after all: The Turks didn’t have heavy artillery at Vienna. Just so, Stoye (History/Magdalen College, Oxford) carefully amends much of what we know about that famed siege.
The Ottoman Empire did not advance on Vienna by whim in 1683. One of its interests was to keep Hungary, “a cluster of fortresses in water-logged country,” in the Turkish camp by, among other things, suppressing non-Islamic religions more or less equally, giving Protestantism equal footing with Catholicism and Orthodoxy. The Ottoman’s understanding of European divisions was essentially correct, since Eastern Europe feared Rome more than Istanbul. The Habsburgs, meanwhile, reckoned the Ottomans a negotiable threat, sure that “Louis XIV was more to be feared than Mehmed IV,” since France was emerging as a continental power with expansionist ambitions of its own. But then, so was Poland, and so was Russia, and so were various German states. The Habsburgs amended their view when 100,000 Ottoman soldiers, including fine cavalry and artillery, arrived at the gates of Vienna and laid a siege that, for a time, was a business-as-usual sort of thing—until hunger and disease settled in. Effectively unable to do much, and beset by rebel forces from fallen colonies, the Habsburgs let it slip that they could use help, whereupon those ambitious powers competed to relieve Vienna. Yet they also worked in alliance, given powerful stimulus in the “military implications if Kara Mustafa permanently lodged an Ottoman garrison in the heart of Europe.” Finally, the siege was lifted when the famed Polish warrior king Jan Sobieski arrived with 30,000 well-trained soldiers, closely followed by 40,000 troops led by French Duke Charles V. Better armed and led, the allied forces secured the region from the Turks, setting the Ottomans on a slow course of decline.
A solid, if staid, narrative of events once well-known throughout Europe, and now the province of a few specialists.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-933648-14-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2006
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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