A juicy account of George’s challenging and colorful relationships with his siblings, told from a fresh perspective.
British historian Tillyard (Citizen Lord, 1998, etc.) paints a Hanoverian family portrait centered on the reign of the eldest brother, who became King of England in 1760.
Prince of Wales at 13 due to the sudden death of his father, George III succeeded his grandfather to the throne at 22. With the title came the need for a queen and an heir. An arranged marriage solved this first dilemma, though bride and groom met just five hours before their wedding. Such are the gossipy stories contained in Tillyard’s latest. Relying heavily on material in foreign collections, she focuses mainly on George’s sister, Caroline, and brothers Henry and William, presumably because their stories are more ribald than those of staid siblings Augusta and Edward. None of them left much in the way of documents, and the author speculates that George himself probably removed anything scandalous from his own collection. Tillyard still teases out a surprising amount of detail. Married off at 15 to her cousin, the King of Denmark, who proved both neglectful and mentally ill, Caroline found herself alone and bored in a distant land. She began a secret affair with the royal doctor, who manipulated power in the kingdom for nearly two years until the scandal became known. Back home in England, Prince Henry was far less secretive about his romantic pursuits. Catching him in flagrante, one cuckolded lord sued the prince for damages and won; Henry had to be bailed out by his richer brother. William’s secret marriage (without royal approval) resulted in passage of the Royal Marriages Act. George had his own problems, most notably with a group of troublemakers in a place known now as America. This dispute, as well as the king’s slow spiral into insanity, are only briefly covered.
A juicy account of George’s challenging and colorful relationships with his siblings, told from a fresh perspective.Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-6371-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2006
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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