All chroniclers of popular history should be required to study Ackroyd’s writing, his methodology, and the totality of his...
Ackroyd (Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day, 2017, etc.) fans rejoice! The fourth volume of the author’s History of England series has arrived.
As usual, history buffs will find plenty to ponder, and casual readers will enjoy Ackroyd’s storytelling manner as he continues to expose little-known facts of British history—e.g., the Bank of England was originally a subscription effort, and the pound sterling became the monetary standard under Sir Isaac Newton. In the third volume, Ackroyd dealt with the Glorious Revolution of 1688; here, he digs deeply into the financial revolution under William and Mary. The Bank of England, pound, and the stock exchange were initiated to fund the latest war with France. New finances encouraged the lower gentry—those with money and land but no lineage—in their slavery to the false gods of aspiring “middling” classes. The time period also saw a significant agricultural revolution, with an increase in enclosures of large estates; wide-scale farmers looked to new methods of drainage, hedging and rotating crops, putting many peasant farmers out of business and forcing them to the cities. The conversion from wood to coal required miners; the arrival of steam gave birth to mills and factories, which required the small hands of women and children; and the union with Scotland created the largest free-trade area in the world. While the Enlightenment barely touched England’s shores, the Industrial Revolution could only have been born there, where geography, material and mineral riches, and thriving colonial trade all combined to make the perfect spot. The loss of America showed Britain that it was easier to trade with colonies than to rule them. In this dizzying era, there was also time for the birth of the Fourth Estate because Parliament forgot to extend a censorship law, giving rise to the golden age of political journalism. Through it all, the author is a delightful guide.
All chroniclers of popular history should be required to study Ackroyd’s writing, his methodology, and the totality of his treatment of his subjects.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-00364-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
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