Fresh and illuminating history.
An intimate look inside the 16th-century household.
In this natural follow-up to How to Be a Victorian (2014), historian Goodman mines advice manuals, poems, letters, Shakespeare’s plays, and even cookbooks to etch in captivating detail a portrait of life in Tudor and Elizabethan England. The majority of the population lived in the countryside, toiling from the cockerel’s crow to sunset. They rose from bed in a drafty room, emerging, if they were lucky, from a curtained four-poster and feather bed, keeping them warm even in winter; from a ruder wooden bedstead and wool mattress; or, if they were servants or laborers, from a hay mattress on the floor. Goodman has tried them all. “I can confidently state,” she writes, “why so many Tudor people gave beds a central position in their thoughts.” The author has also donned typical linen underwear, confidently debunking the myth that medieval people reeked of body odor. Even without daily baths (proscribed to prevent pores from opening to “evil miasmas or foul air”), she “remained remarkably smell-free” after three months. Goodman has also eaten Tudor food: with many farm chores begun at dawn, dinner was served as early as 10:00 or 11:00. Bread was the staple, served at every meal, taking the place of rice, pasta, potatoes, and, often, vegetables. Goodman offers recipes for breads and porridge, describes all varieties of ovens, and discloses the proper way to roast temptingly succulent beef or lamb. Tudor food, she writes, is “fresh and seasonal and cooked over wood or peat fires whose smoke is a pleasant flavor addition.” As to daily labor, the author has done enough ploughing with unwieldy ploughs to attest that it is exhausting. She has also made cheese, fashioned ruffs, shot Tudor-style bows and arrows, and learned to make silk braids, a skill at which her daughter became so expert that she was a hand double on Wolf Hall.
Fresh and illuminating history.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63149-139-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
BOOK REVIEW
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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