A meandering and highly entertaining amble through fascinating bits of history that culminates in the horrors of the...
The final volume in London-based author and publisher Winder’s trilogy about the history of Europe, following Germania (2010) and Danubia (2014).
In this history of an ill-defined region of Europe—not quite Germany, not quite France, running along both sides of the Rhine, encompassing northern reaches of the Netherlands and including Flanders, Luxembourg, and Alsace-Lorraine all the way to Switzerland—the author brings the material rivetingly alive with the sheer elasticity of his imagination and prose. This region, “a mass of illogicality,” was first defined after Charlemagne’s death in 814 and named for one of his three grandsons, Lothair (thus, Lotharingia, created by 843), and it has “provoked wars in every century and…been the site of many of the events which have defined European civilization.” Moving chronologically, Winder marvels at how little we know about this region before the onslaught of Julius Caesar. When the Roman general lifted the veil in The Gallic War, it appeared as “a series of highly organized, sophisticated societies, in terms of military technology hard for the Romans to defeat and with large, complex and tough ships designed for the harsh weather of the Atlantic.” Tracing the disintegration of the invading marauders and the early Christian centuries’ attempts to “erase all trace of native paganism,” Winder enlivens his accounts with chronicles of his visits to many of these ancient archaeological grounds. Sifting through massive amounts of information covering centuries, he wisely structures the narrative around certain spots, such as Amiens or Beaune, and sharp profiles of notable historical figures—e.g., Hildegard von Bingen, “an obscure mystic from the twelfth-century Rhineland,” or Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, whose paintings were created “to drive you onto your knees, to think about our fate in a fallen world.” Throughout, Winder infuses his account with such energy and wit that readers may be pleasantly unaware of the many history lessons he imparts.
A meandering and highly entertaining amble through fascinating bits of history that culminates in the horrors of the invading armies of the world wars.Pub Date: April 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-19218-1
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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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