A competent account of a spectacularly eventful historical period.
The history of an “epic clash of civilizations.”
Journalist Reston (The Conviction of Richard Nixon: The Untold Story of the Frost/Nixon Interviews, 2007, etc.) is the author or two previous books about major Christian-Muslim clashes—Dogs of God (2005) and Warriors of God (2001). Here he looks at a turbulent time featuring not one but several brutal confrontations. His Christian protagonist is Charles V (1500–58), who became Holy Roman Emperor thanks to his grandfather, Maximilian I. Charles also inherited the Low Countries from his father and the Spanish Empire from his other grandparents. Opposing Charles was Suleyman I (1494–1566), sultan of the Ottoman Empire under whom it reached the height of its power. Reston stresses that these deeply pious rulers loathed each other less than heretics within their own religion. Charles worked to suppress the charismatic Martin Luther’s rebellion against Catholic doctrine. A Sunni Muslim, Suleyman massacred Shi’ites within his realm and repeatedly invaded Shi’ite Persia in an effort to wipe them out. Both efforts failed, but three massive Ottoman invasions of Europe got as far as the gates of Vienna. History would have been vastly different had they succeeded, which almost happened because Charles and a colorful cast of secondary characters—Henry VIII of England, Francis I of France, Luther, several scheming popes—preferred to battle each other. Reston recounts the facts without the breathless dramatics many popularizers cannot resist, but since he is not a professional historian, there are few strong opinions and little deep analysis.
A competent account of a spectacularly eventful historical period.Pub Date: May 18, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59420-225-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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 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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