A comprehensive anthology of essays by highly placed British academics (joined by one from West Point) that survey military development in the Middle Ages. Arguing in his introduction that —war is central to the narrative political story of the middle ages,— Keen (History/Oxford; Chivalry, 1984) has assembled a series of 12 crisply topical essays that consider how warfare became increasingly organized, mechanized, and militarized between 900 and 1500. Keen and his fellow authors make clear that this acceleration of war-making was primarily defensive, as the fledgling European societies were regularly besieged by invaders like the Magyars and Vikings. In an attention-getting early chapter, H.B. Clark observes that the Vikings derived much of their power from their simultaneously elusive and brutal nature (they combined sophisticated tactics of organized raiding with a knack of attracting poetic tributes to their violence). John Gillingham’s —An Age of Expansion— shows how this defensive pattern underlies the warfare over Saxony and the later colonial wars in Spain, Scotland, and Ireland. And Peter Edbury’s —Warfare in the Latin East— examines the defensive motivations of the European campaigns against Muslims ranging from Eastern Europe to Jerusalem, campaigns we remember as the Crusades. Later chapters deal with more tactical matters, exploring how proprietary medieval notions, particularly chivalry, fared in the context of warfare’s increasing standardization, and covering the developing range of fortifications, siege tactics, and arms and armor. Following Christopher Allmand’s unusual survey of —War and the Non-Combatant,— Keen closes with his own review of the emergence of cannon, gunpowder, and permanent armies as the ultimate developments of medieval militarism. A scrupulously prepared survey that will be invaluable to students and accessible to committed lay readers. (100 b&w illus.) (History Book Club Split Main selection)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-19-820639-9
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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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