Biographer, historian and novelist Ackroyd (Three Brothers, 2014, etc.) continues his History of England series with the third of six proposed volumes.
What makes the author so special is that he relates history as it once was told by the bards. Ackroyd tells us not just the history, but the story behind it and the story as it might have been viewed at the time. This was a violent period of religious struggle, with countless groups vying to eliminate each other and all of them hating the Catholics. King James was so impressed by the wealth of England that he immediately set about spending just about every penny in the treasury. He relied mostly on the help of his favorites at court, particularly the Duke of Buckingham, who scoffed at Parliament’s impeachment. The premature death of Henry, James’ eldest and most Protestant son, left inept Charles to inherit the throne and continue the Stuart traditions of divine right and treating Parliament as his piggy bank. They just couldn’t accept that the king might be subject to English common law. All this led up to the civil war, the beheading of Charles and the rise of Oliver Cromwell, who was a man with more power than any king and who ruled as an absolute military dictator. His death quickly brought Parliament together to reinstitute the House of Lords and the office of king in the person of Charles II. He and his brother, James II, clung to the Catholic religion, generally poor attitude toward Parliament and lots of devious plots, which inevitably led up to the Glorious Revolution. Oddly enough, during the reigns of the early Stuart kings, trade increased, shipbuilding peaked, coal production doubled, and the agricultural revolution laid the basis for the 18th-century’s Industrial Revolution.
Appropriately detailed, beautifully written story of the Stuarts’ rise and fall—will leave readers clamoring for the further adventures awaiting England in the 18th century.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-1250003638
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | WORLD | HISTORY
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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
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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. 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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