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
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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