A capable history sure to appeal to all lovers of France.
Fenby (Will China Dominate the 21st Century?, 2014, etc.) investigates France’s attempts to live up to her revolutionary ideals and how she has become a prisoner of her history and its narratives.
The author, well-versed in all matters French, examines politics and governments through all of the conflicts of the past 200 years, and he provides occasional sidebars that offer quick, insightful biographies of the primary players through France’s history. Even though by 1830 there had been multiple regime changes, that period was almost stable compared to what would come after Louis Napoleon. The nephew of the emperor was elected president in 1848, but the disarray of the National Assembly gave him the impetus to stage his own coup. He became Napoleon III in 1852 and ushered in the Second Empire, and he lasted until the war of 1870. The Third Republic’s first president, Adolphe Thiers, declared that a “republic was the form of government that divides us least.” Only one president from that government completed his full term, and France endured through countless different forms of government between the world wars. The Third Republic fell because it failed to resolve 150 years of conflicts and live up to France’s view of itself. The numerous parties and the electorate’s tendency to swing with the economy prove the old saying, “the French wear their hearts on the left, their wallets on the right.” The Fourth Republic featured Philippe Petain’s collaborationist Vichy administration during World War II, and today we have the Fifth Republic, which came to be under the Machiavellian Charles de Gaulle. The nation currently suffers under the inflexible regulations of her labor code and living beyond their means for 40 years thanks to their generous social system. For all the confusion, twisting and turning of politics, student revolts, and peasant uprisings, France has survived, and Fenby dutifully guides us through.
A capable history sure to appeal to all lovers of France.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-09683-8
Page Count: 544
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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