A sprightly, anecdote-laden, handsomely illustrated history of the pets of royals over the past five centuries. Historian MacDonogh, an Oxford graduate who has written for History Today, the Literary Review, and the Evening Standard, has pored over documents ranging from the diaries of Samuel Pepys to the memoirs of Catherine the Great and the Duchess of Windsor to assemble this entertaining account. While in Europe, royal dogs held center stage—cats lacking the macho image sought by kings and being for a time associated with witchcraft—in Asia, cats were often the pampered favorites. MacDonogh explores in detail the psychological role played by loyal and affectionate pets in the artificial and isolated life at court. The attachment of owner to pet was at times astonishing: Quoted at length are letters between Frederick the Great and his sister Wilhelmina addressed to and signed as if by his greyhound and her spaniel, and the author describes a lavish wedding thrown by the Maharajah of Junagadh for his favorite dog. In a more serious vein, the author reveals how the very existence of some breeds has been threatened by their royal owners’ downfalls: Borzois, beloved by the imperial family, almost vanished after the Russian Revolution. While her narrative is rich in fascinating trivia, MacDonogh has provided a goodly amount of solid history. Royal pets are the ostensible subject, but the social customs of the court provide the background. In depicting the care and treatment of the pets (dwarfs and later black pages were often entrusted with their care) and in describing how their illnesses and deaths were handled (since Queen Victoria all British monarchs have erected headstones for their pets), for example, MacDonogh reveals much about the life and times of their royal owners. An appealing gift for both animal lovers and history buffs. (70 color and 50 b&w illustrations)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-22837-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1999
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
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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