An educative history and fresh civics lesson for a new generation.
A wide-ranging study of the social and political makeup of 17th-century Britain.
Healey, a professor of social history at Oxford, offers an ambitious narrative stuffed with engaging detail about the social and political developments that led to the overthrow of the Stuart monarchy, restoration, and shift to a constitutional monarchy following the Glorious Revolution of 1688. With the explosion of the press and proliferation of free schools came “the rise of the literate middling sort”—i.e., those below the gentry class—who grew more politically active and opinionated and who were directly involved in challenging the authoritarian strictures of James I and his son, Charles I. The author is particularly insightful on the advancement of this “middling sort.” As challenges to the monarchy mounted, Parliament began to gain real power and became “the institutional voice of the new political classes.” Healey ably chronicles the suspenseful buildup to the shocking regicide of 1649 via two primary threads: republicanism, tinged with fervid anti-Catholicism; and royal absolutism. The author gives a fair assessment of Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, whose “unattractive Puritanism, apparently vaunting ambition, and of course brutal conquest of Ireland helped taint republicanism for centuries and still does, to a point.” As Healey convincingly shows, “one of the great tragedies” of the time was that Cromwell “prevented the Republic being so much more.” In addition to his keen attention to the lives of ordinary citizens, the author includes portraits of many of the important thinkers and visionaries of the time, including Isaac Newton, John Locke, Francis Bacon, Samuel Pepys, and Margaret Cavendish, whose early science-fiction novel provides the title for Healey’s book. “The political world we live in today, with regular parliaments and elections, ideologically defined parties [and] a vibrant press…was born in the seventeenth century,” writes Healey. “For this…the story told here remains fascinating and vital to this day.” Most readers will agree.
An educative history and fresh civics lesson for a new generation.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780593318355
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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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