Arch, authoritative and richly descriptive.
Portrait of the evolution of French court life and politics at Versailles.
British scholar Spawforth (Ancient History/Newcastle Univ.; The Complete Greek Temples, 2006, etc.) details the construction, restoration and daily intrigues at the royal palace—the opulent official residence and center of government—from the reign of Louis XIV to Louis XVI, the last kings of France. From 1682, when Louis XIV moved his then Paris-based court 12 miles west to the sleepy village of Versailles, until 1789, when thousands rose in protest against the flagrant excesses of the monarchy, the royal palace stood as a symbol of the grandeur and disgrace of France. About the public disaffection with aristocrats in advance of the French Revolution, the author writes, “Did Louis XVI need two thousand horses when Louis XIV had managed with seven hundred?” Drawing on memoirs, diaries, invoices, architectural plans and holdings from the palace archives, Spawforth elevates Versailles from an upscale tourist attraction to a breathing monument with a spellbinding flesh-and-blood history. Among other fascinating tidbits, readers learn that the monarchy routinely sold menial household jobs to poor families who coveted the social cachet of the palace. Positions such as royal chimney sweep, table clearer, clock winder and bearer of the king’s chamber pot were purchased by status-conscious commoners as investments and passed from father to son for generations. In a fast-paced narrative, the author discusses the importance of dance, haute cuisine, costume balls and couture at Versailles, noting that clothes were a major expense of court life. In addition to dozens of wardrobe valets and 13 dressers whose sole duty was to pass Louis XIV his cane, cloak and gloves, the king kept a lacemaker at the ready for mending. The gross disparities between the nobles at Versailles and the suffering masses in France in the 1780s made inevitable, Spawforth asserts, the gruesome end for Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI.
Arch, authoritative and richly descriptive.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-35785-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2008
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 Yorkerstaff 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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