As this erudite but lively survey attests, there was appreciably more than red coats to the British army's splendid uniforms during the Georgian and early Victorian eras. Drawing on a potpourri of contemporary sources and a bit of modern psychology, historian Myerly offers a wide-ranging, interpretive audit of what soldiers of the king (and, later, queen) were wearing (and why) during the first half of the 19th century. While it was the sovereign's prerogative to establish dress codes for the military (which manifested the crown's power), he notes that regimental commanders frequently took liberties with the monarch's designs, at no small cost to the troops. In many instances, the author points out, the demands of appearance over practicality reached ludicrous extremes. Cases in point range from stylish jackets so tight, cavalrymen could not wield their sabers in battle, through cumbersome headgear of the sort that once unhorsed the otherwise dashing duke of Wellington on a windy parade ground. As Myerly makes clear, however, there was considerable method to the costly madness of making fashion plates of prospective combatants. By way of example, he documents how sartorial splendor proved an inducement for recruiters, fostered esprit de corps in times of peace and war, and helped intimidate rebellious mobs when army units were called upon to restore order on the home front. The author goes on to argue that the English public's fondness for pomp, circumstance, and pageantry helped mitigate its instinctive hostility toward the nation's armed forces. Indeed, he observes, civilian apparel borrowed freely from martial livery, while industry, divers elites, and such institutions as the Salvation Army adapted military discipline and its fancy dress to their own ends. A splendid, if special, study that sheds considerable light on the sociopolitical status of the United Kingdom at a time when the island nation was governing a world-class empire. (32 illustrations, half in color, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-674-08249-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996
HISTORY | MODERN | MILITARY | GENERAL HISTORY
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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