Appropriately detailed, beautifully written story of the Stuarts’ rise and fall—will leave readers clamoring for the further...
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. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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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