Occasionally entertaining bedside reading for history buffs, but not much more.
Another global history set in a pivotal year.
Following the recent fashion for historical narratives pegged to significant dates—Olivier Bernier’s The World in 1800 (p. 220), Jules Witcover’s The Year the Dream Died (1997), and Robert Lacey’s The Year 1000 (1999), to name a few—Wills (History/Univ. of Southern California) weighs in with this account of 1688, the year of England’s Glorious Revolution, the flourishing of the Filipino galleon trade, the westward growth of the Ottoman empire, and the increased systematization of the African slave trade, among other developments. Featuring such colorful figures such as William Penn, the Viceroy of Ouidah, and Aphra Behn, the narrative takes fascinating turns into little-known episodes of history. Among the more obscure actors who turn up here are the Dog Shogun, a Japanese ruler who apparently cared more for dogs than people; Father Vincenzo Coronelli, who launched what may have been the world’s first atlas-publishing company and built what was at the time the world’ s largest globe; the Mongol emperor Kangxi, who strove to integrate the many different ethnic groups under his rule against growing threats from Russia and Japan; and the Scottish-born general Patrick Gordon, whose service under two tsars helped make Russia a threat to begin with. However, Wills seldom expands his character sketches beyond mere vignettes, except in the better-developed sections on Britain and British colonial matters, and he fails to find a theme connecting people and places across the reach of space. As a result, his account is little more than a compendium of interesting but isolated events that happened to occur in a certain year. Reading it is much like watching a movie full of star cameos but without a plot.
Occasionally entertaining bedside reading for history buffs, but not much more.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-393-04744-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
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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