Likely to be the go-to history of modern Spain for many years to come.
One of the leading authorities on 20th-century Spain paints a dark portrait of the political history of the Iberian nation that has long struggled to find solid government and leadership.
Preston, a professor at the London School of Economics who has written many books on the history, politics, and culture of modern Spain, barely hides his anger at the failures of Spain’s major figures over the past two centuries. “Violence, corruption and incompetence of the political class have betrayed the population since 1833 and almost certainly before,” he writes near the beginning. He continues, “unlike, say, France or Italy after 1871, Spanish governments failed to create an all-embracing sense of nationhood.” Opening this authoritative yet searingly critical narrative with the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1874, Preston takes us smoothly through the ruinous Spanish-American War, the Spanish Civil War and its long, repressive Francoist aftermath, and the country’s transformation into a republic since the 1970s. The author, a discerning critic of a country he clearly understands, delivers a comprehensive, vivid, and bleak record of assassinations, betrayals, anarchist attacks, extrajudicial exterminations, military coups, terrorism, dictatorship, endless corruption, and economic ruin. Even the post-Franco return of representative government and democracy within a monarchy has been “painful,” the republic’s young life a mixture of “grandeur and misery.” Preston leaves readers pessimistic about the ability of Spain’s current regime to lead the country into a bright future, and the author’s unrelenting disappointment with the country he loves is sometimes taxing to readers. The book could have used some lighter-hued relief with more focus on Spain’s ordinary people, who have always gotten on with their lives despite officialdom’s poisonous struggles for power. In the book’s welter of detail about politics and culture, the achievements of average Spaniards often get lost. Still, the scope of the narrative and the obvious depth of research are impressive.
Likely to be the go-to history of modern Spain for many years to come. (20 b/w illustrations)Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-87140-868-6
Page Count: 752
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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