Hennessy (Contemporary History/London), a former correspondent for the Times of London and The Economist, offers a massive history—impressively scholarly and as engagingly readable as the best journalism—about the first six years of Britain's postwar transformation from an imperial power into a welfare state. This first volume of Hennessy's projected history of post- World War II Britain does not pretend to be a model of objectivity: The author writes in his preface and introduction of his patriotism and love of English civilization, frequently identifying with George Orwell's love/hate relationship with his country. Nonetheless, Hennessy is rigorously factual as he briskly details Britain's plunge into war in September 1939, the bungling of the early campaigns of battle, the fall of Chamberlain's government, the Battle of Britain's transformative social impact on the English people, and Britain's victorious struggle against Hitler after the US entered the war. After Clement Atlee's Labour government succeeded Churchill's war government in July 1945, British social policy became more avowedly socialist and egalitarian while its imperial perogatives dwindled. Hennessy contrasts the development of the National Health Service and the other apparatus of the welfare state with Britain's declining ability to dictate the course of world events. While Britain lost India, her proudest colonial possession, the nation increasingly looked to the US for leadership in European affairs (though the Suez crisis, which for Hennessy marked the end of British imperialism and the culmination of an attitudinal sea-change for Britain's leaders, lies in the future, at the end of Hennessy's history). Hennessy ends with a delightful snapshot of ``midcentury Britain'' in which he describes the shifting social mores of an increasingly egalitarian, rapidly changing—though still backward-looking—people. An absorbing, limpidly written study of the political and social dimensions of England's graceful descent from greatness.
Pub Date: April 18, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-43363-5
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994
HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
