The latest on the rise of Anglo-Saxon Britain, but directed at a scholarly readership.
What did the Romans ever do for Britain?
Higham, author of King Arthur: The Making of the Legend (2018), reminds readers that Rome conquered Britain in the first century and abandoned it in the fifth but always considered it a land at the edge of the world inhabited by barbarians. Germanic tribes that invaded Gaul, Spain, and the Balkans quickly adopted Roman culture, language, and Christianity, yet Britain was an exception. English owes less to Latin than Romance languages. Even the Anglo-Saxon “invasion” was more likely a migration, although by 500 C.E., Britain was divided between a British west and a Germanic east. Higham warns against seeing the Britain of that era through an Arthurian lens; that legend was created later. In the absence of effective government, significant warfare was rare before the sixth century, when early British and Anglo-Saxon kingdoms took shape. Higham eschews turgid academic prose, but this is a scholarly work less concerned with bringing an ancient culture to life than examining surviving evidence to determine if it describes reality. Literacy was a church monopoly, so surviving documents focus on usually obscure theological quarrels. Events of the day—mostly disastrous—were considered God’s punishment on a depraved humanity, so accounts of government and culture took second place to pleas for readers to repent. A fifth-century monk, Gildas, produced the only account of this period written by a contemporary; the many pages that Higham devotes to a close textual analysis will test the average reader’s patience. Unlike historians, archeologists continue to turn up new information, and Higham does not ignore what graves, coins, tools, and, lately, DNA reveal, although the end result is often controversy rather than hard data.
The latest on the rise of Anglo-Saxon Britain, but directed at a scholarly readership.Pub Date: April 21, 2026
ISBN: 9780300254921
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
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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