A mostly entertaining mixture of esoteric social history and well-known details of the personal lives of Tudor monarchs.
Amusing, well-researched biographies of rulers from Henry VII to Elizabeth I, focused on how they were born, dressed, ate, washed, slept, played, and died.
For readers anticipating salacious surprises, Borman (The Story of the Tower of London, 2015, etc.), joint chief curator of the Historic Royal Palaces and chief executive of the Heritage Education Trust, explains that they were rarely alone, so tales of clandestine royal trysts that have come down were mostly fictional, but she does not ignore them. Privacy, a later concept, barely touched the Tudors. “Even in their most private moments,” writes the author, “they were accompanied by a servant specifically appointed for the task.” Entering a typical palace, one passed through a public great chamber into a presence chamber (throne room), where the ruler dined in state, received visitors, and chaired council meetings, and then to the privy chamber, which was both lodging and the name of the organization that governed them. It was not very private, and every royal activity, from dining to preparing the royal bed to dressing the royal person in the morning, was subject to formal ceremony. Thus, Tudor monarchs did not go to the bathroom; the bathroom came to them, led by the groom of the stool, who managed a portable privy and attended his master when he used it. An important official, he supervised the other grooms and oversaw items in daily use such as jewels, plates, linens, and the Privy Purse. Borman delivers plenty of similar tidbits on 16th-century diet, hygiene, medicine, and sport à la Ian Mortimer’s A Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England (2013). She also includes familiar (perhaps too-familiar) details of royal private lives—e.g., Henry VIII’s pursuit of wives, Elizabeth’s nonpursuit of husbands.
A mostly entertaining mixture of esoteric social history and well-known details of the personal lives of Tudor monarchs.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2599-6
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | 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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