A well-researched, engaging history.
A journalist’s highly readable account of Portuguese monarch João VI’s historic 1808 flight from Europe and subsequent exile in Brazil.
In 1804, Napoleon crowned himself emperor of the French. But by 1807, the year Gomes’ book opens, he “ruled as absolute lord of Europe.” Aside from Britain, only one continental nation, Portugal, remained unconquered. Unwilling to surrender but unable to fend off a full-scale invasion, the fearful and often indecisive Prince Regent João VI, whose “sickly obesity gave him the air of a peaceful dullard,” deceived Napoleon long enough to transfer his entire court to Brazil. Shepherded by the indomitable British navy, the trans-Atlantic voyage was fraught with challenges for the Portuguese ruler and his retinue, who faced the ever-present risk of disease. But it was João’s abandoned people who paid the price for his ultimately successful flight. By 1814, 500,000 Portuguese had starved or died or fled the country to escape the chaos created in the wake of their monarch’s departure. Meanwhile, the court lived comfortably in sultry Rio de Janeiro. The greedy beneficiaries of the colony’s mineral and agricultural wealth, João and his nouveau riche ministers still managed to lay down the cornerstones of a national infrastructure. They built roads, schools and factories, opened up Brazilian ports to trade with other countries and united quarreling colonial provinces. The king many dismissed as unfit to rule departed in 1821, with only one-third his retinue, to return to a Portugal wracked by chaos and revolution. In a grand twist of historical irony, what he left behind became the makings of a vibrantly complex society that now stands poised to become a major economic power.
A well-researched, engaging history.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0762787968
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
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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