Every student of English history will enjoy this story, which is delightfully easy to read and remarkable for what it leaves...
For those who missed his first edition in 1996, Strong (Scenes and Apparitions: The Roy Strong Diaries, 1987-2003, 2017, etc.) is back with an updated popular history of Britain, whose people “cherish their island as a domain separate and inviolate from the rest of the world.”
Throughout this highly readable history, which the author admits “is built with gratitude on the work of others,” Strong carefully plucks out not just the most memorable, but the most momentous events in each era. Moving from Roman times and the arrival of Christianity, the author asserts the well-known fact that it was the monasteries that preserved the writings of the ancient world of Greece and Rome. In Northumbria, the scholarly civilization reached its apex in the seventh and eighth centuries. As Strong demonstrates, the Norman invasion was one of the most significant pieces of British history, with the coming of feudalism and a new ruling class that showed the importance of a strong king to the maintenance of government structures. Richard II is an instructive example of a ruler who made peace with France, Ireland, and Scotland but fought with his noblemen. The author is excellent at uncovering goodness and noteworthy effects on history by even the least likable kings. The Tudor crises—with religion and thus with Europe in general—postponed the coming of the Renaissance to England until the reign of Charles I, who eased travel abroad and encouraged Renaissance architecture and art, exemplified by Inigo Jones, Peter Paul Rubens, and Anthony van Dyck. Later, the Great Reform Act of 1832, which was passed to prevent peasant revolts, led to government social programs but ensured the middle class was kept in its place. It actually perpetuated elite control of government, but that power slowly collapsed under the unloved George IV, William IV, and the young Victoria.
Every student of English history will enjoy this story, which is delightfully easy to read and remarkable for what it leaves to the side as well as for its insights into the deepest consequences of individual actions.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64313-013-2
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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