Richly detailed, concisely narrated: a superb, myth-shattering portrait of an epochal event.
Designs turn to accidents, and great ships to splinters, in this rousing tale of the Elizabethan navy’s finest hour.
Spain and England were relatively recent rivals in the late 16th century, but their competition was fierce—pirate raid here, sea skirmish there, blood spilled wherever Spanish and English ships met. Among other things, Spain’s Philip II, a Habsburg ruler, had to keep England and France from allying. That possibility, writes British journalist Hanson (The Custom of the Sea, 2000, etc.), was real enough when Mary, Queen of Scots, was alive. In those days, Philip avoided trying to overthrow Elizabeth “lest it prove a Pyrrhic victory, restoring England to the true faith only by placing a French queen upon the throne.” Readers without a keen sense of early-modern royal intrigues and alliances may be lost in the early pages of Hanson’s sprawling history, but in time things become clearer: with the French-hating (and, Hanson notes, memorably foul-breathed) Elizabeth safely on the throne, Philip was free to set his navy against hers in an effort not just to gain supremacy of the seas, but to launch Catholic revolts against the crown in Ireland and Scotland. It was a pretty plan, but, Hanson observes, it overlooked the fact that the Armada “was never equal to the task it had been set.” Received wisdom to the contrary, Spain’s ships were fewer and less technologically advanced than the lighter, faster British ships they faced, and Philip made some tactical decisions that may well have doomed his fleet in advance. Hanson’s account of the great naval battle off the southern coast of England will thrill fans of C.S. Forester and Patrick O’Brian, whose fictional creations would seem to owe much to the Francis Drake the author ably portrays here. The aftermath, with Spanish survivors straggling ashore only to meet gruesome ends, is just as well told—and just as full of intrigue.
Richly detailed, concisely narrated: a superb, myth-shattering portrait of an epochal event.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4294-1
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2004
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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