A satisfying excursion for medieval-history buffs.
A lively reconstruction of events in medieval English history, full of all the good stuff: murder, adultery, treason, and a few beheadings.
Isabella, the daughter of French king Philip Le Bel and Johanna of Navarre, is a minor figure in world history, all things considered; Mel Gibson’s 1995 film Braveheart gives her a far more important role in the unpleasantness between England and Scotland of the late-13th and early-14th centuries than the facts warrant, especially by supposing that the Scottish leader William Wallace was the father of her child, who would become Edward III. For all that, Isabella did chalk up some significant deeds, not least of which, writes English mystery author and historian Doherty (The Mysterious Death of Tutankhamun, 2002, etc.), was that “she brought about the first formal deposition of an English king, even though it was for her own selfish motives.” That king was Edward II, son of Edward Longshanks, who emerges in Doherty’s account as a feckless but not altogether bad fellow; his downfall came not through his homosexual dallying, as Braveheart hints, but through his overall lack of interest in running an empire, a job Isabella was only too happy to take on in the name of her son, fathered not by Edward but by the English exile Roger Mortimer. The existence of both heir and bedroom rival meant, of course, that Edward II had to be done away with, and Isabella engineered a nicely gruesome end for him. Confused yet? Well, the times were plenty confusing—they could hardly be otherwise in a milieu when royal spymasters wrote to the Pope to ask for blessings against spells cast by rival magicians, and when the death of a child in Norway could set about a struggle over monastic succession in France. Doherty deftly keeps the players and the facts lined up, delivering an entertaining tale as well.
A satisfying excursion for medieval-history buffs.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7867-1193-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
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 Yorker staff 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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