There may be no family in the world of whom one reads so much yet knows so little as the British Royal Family, but Flamini (Ava, 1982; Pope, Premier, President, 1980) now gives us an informed and credible if still discreet portrait, timed to coincide with the queen's 65th birthday. Queen Elizabeth was the eldest daughter of Prince Albert, George V`s second son, who grew up very much in the shadow of the more glamorous Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII. When Edward was forced to abdicate, the shy, tongue-tied Albert unexpectedly ascended the throne as George VI. Elizabeth, also shy and sheltered, succeeded him when she was just 25, and has now been on the throne for nearly 40 years. The portrait of her that emerges here is an intriguing one. Much of it is familiar: her conscientiousness, sense of duty, lack of small talk, love of horses, lack of intellectual interests. But much is less well known: she is knowledgeable, well briefed, with definite opinions, often very sensible ones. And much discussed here has been obscure: why has she given Prince Philip, whom she ``adores,'' so much less to do than, say, Queen Victoria gave her adored Albert? Why has she never named Philip Prince Consort? Flamini suggests that it was because of opposition to Philip among Elizabeth's courtiers, who saw him as too blunt, too likely to make waves, at a time when she was young and inexperienced herself and reliant upon their advice; and when she gained confidence, she like her unfettered role. A good read, with a lot of inside detail, but a bit like those broad histories of American political campaigns before Theodore White really started analyzing them.
Pub Date: April 19, 1991
ISBN: 0-385-29917-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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