An earnest effort, though readers will be better served by turning to the old masters: Simon Schama, Fernand Braudel, and...
“Storm over channel; continent isolated.” Thus a famous London headline of decades past, which finds a modern rejoinder in this watery but pleasant study.
Nazi Germany overran France in a trice back in 1940. That it did not overrun England, writes UK diplomat and historian Unwin, “is a measure . . . of the Channel’s ability to frustrate those who do not approach it with sufficient seriousness.” Unwin’s book is full of such portentous assertions—the Germans weren’t known for their frivolity, of course; nor were the Romans, who crossed the channel to make Pictish Britain an outlier of their empire; nor were the sailors of the Spanish Armada and a few odd generations of French privateers—but when he sets down to storytelling, as with, for instance, his spirited and sanguinary reconstruction of the Battle of Agincourt, he does a fine job. England and France, naturally, figure as the chief actors in Unwin’s centuries-long drama of the English Channel/La Manche’s role in world affairs; but readers without much knowledge of regional history may be surprised to learn that England waged a much costlier contest with the Dutch, whose seizure of state power in 1688 was recast by embarrassed historians into the Glorious Revolution, which, Unwin gamely writes, “perpetuates the myth that no one has successfully invaded England since 1066.” Unwin stocks up on good moments (as with his interesting contrast of Mont St Michel, near the meeting point of Normandy and Brittany, with its cousin, St Michael’s Mount, near Penzance) and unfortunate ones (“The Isles of Scilly are by a large measure more diminutive”) alike. Of particular interest are Unwin’s closing remarks, which posit that the Channel will be a much less important barrier in the future—not strictly as a matter of pure geography, but because “a solipsistic and increasingly dangerous United States” will drive England and France into each other’s arms.
An earnest effort, though readers will be better served by turning to the old masters: Simon Schama, Fernand Braudel, and Jacquetta Hawkes.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-7472-4436-7
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Headline
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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
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