Compelling but frustratingly narrow and not terribly convincing.
More questions than answers emerge from this intriguing look at the problematic marriage that helped spark the English Civil War.
Whitaker (Mad Madge, 2003, etc.) is adept at depicting the spirit and temper of this age of religious fervor, while avoiding finer academic distinctions and hard contextual references. She calls the marriage of Charles I and Henrietta Maria “one of the greatest romances of all time,” yet it was roiled by crises largely due to Henrietta’s supercilious intractability, and the author can’t disguise her ambivalence toward the Catholic zealot who rubbed the English the wrong way. Freshly perusing primary sources, including correspondence between Charles and Henrietta, Whitaker finds that the 1625 political match grew into a warm marriage and meeting of the minds, despite religious differences. She was the lively, outspoken younger sister of Louis XIII, daughter of the terrifying Marie de Medici and assassinated Huguenot King Henri IV. He was the browbeaten son of England’s James I, for years swayed by the influence of his father’s favorite, Lord Buckingham. Henrietta’s huge train of Catholic ladies and her religious rituals at Somerset House scandalized the English, and at one point her retinue was sent packing back to France. By the 1630s, after years of luxurious living and numerous children, Charles’ animus against Parliament led him to take increasingly provocative steps, including the persecution of Puritans and the reinstatement of high church ceremonies viewed by a suspicious populace as the run-up to outright popery. Whitaker’s study shows that with each challenge the royal couple grew more immovable and unbending; Henrietta’s pleas for concessions to Scottish Presbyterianism came too late. Would the Civil War have ended differently had the queen had stayed by her husband’s side instead of fleeing to France? This is among the many issues that the author does not thoroughly address.
Compelling but frustratingly narrow and not terribly convincing.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-393-06079-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
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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