A good choice for scholars and students of the Plantagenets.
A history of King Henry II (1133-1189) and his unpleasant royal sons.
A medieval king did not simply give orders. He was the first among equals, a baron whose land provided income to support his army and who had convinced other barons with their own land and armies that he was the most powerful. Being king was expensive and hard work, but there were always candidates. Crowned in 1154, Henry II ruled Britain and more French territory than the French king. Although called the Angevin Empire, writes broadcaster and historian Barratt (The Forgotten Spy: The Untold Story of Stalin’s First British Mole, 2016, etc.), it was more like a commonwealth since French nobles preferred to rule on their own. Everything began well because Henry took kingship seriously, pacified his realm, and introduced reforms that have persisted to the present time. Then four of his sons reached adulthood and required attention. Henry appointed his eldest heir but gave him no responsibility. He gave lands and income to the others, who acquired more through marriage, but all remained unsatisfied. From the 1170s until well into the following century, the sons engaged in a relentless series of quarrels, wars, rebellions, reconciliations, and betrayals with their father and, then, after his death, with each other and several foreign powers. “What made the Angevin conflict so noteworthy was that Henry’s entire family turned against him,” writes Barratt, “and that so many other powers were dragged into the conflict as a result of interconnected geopolitical alliances.” Matters did not improve when son John emerged as the sole survivor in 1199. Expensive, unpopular wars did not prevent the loss of most French territory, and rebellious British nobles forced him to sign the Magna Carta in 1215. Readers curious about how ordinary people lived in medieval times must look elsewhere, but this is a solid political history of a royal family whose members were pugnacious, grasping, devious, and shortsighted.
A good choice for scholars and students of the Plantagenets.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-571-32910-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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