The lives of these English eccentrics turn a potentially dense chronicle into a delightfully surprising narrative.
A tangled dynastic compilation of a famous Kent house segues into a deft trek through English royal history.
Best known as the mansion in which poet Vita Sackville-West grew up and on which her friend and lover Virginia Woolf based Orlando (1928), the house at Knole has been the nearly continuous domicile of the Sackville earls, dukes and barons since the Elizabethan statesman Thomas Sackville, the first Earl of Dorset, acquired it in 1604. Like other nearby estates such as Holdenby, Burghley and Theobalds, Knole, originally a medieval manor house, was refurbished by Sackville as a show palace befitting his years of loyal service, ultimately as Lord Treasurer. Subsequently, the house fell to his son and wife, Anne Clifford, whose diaries during her long life and troubled marriage offer a marvelous window to the splendor of the Jacobean court, aristocratic rounds, roiling hereditary landowning disputes and the sense of pall and isolation the house often rendered over its inhabitants, particularly the women. The author spryly navigates the English Civil War, when Knole was sequestrated by the Parliamentarians because of resident Edward Sackville’s royalist proclivities. The Restoration coincided with Knole’s glorious resurrection by Charles, the sixth Earl of Dorset, high-living man of letters and friend to the poets. The Sackvilles always “hovered on the periphery of power, participating—just—in the making of history,” writes the author, who actually lives in the house, now owned by the National Trust. His depiction of Vita’s mother, Victoria, mistress of Lionel Sackville-West, makes an especially cracking story.
The lives of these English eccentrics turn a potentially dense chronicle into a delightfully surprising narrative.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8027-7901-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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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