Strictly for those who like their murder mysteries ancient and peopled by aristocrats.
Entertaining royal historian Weir (Henry VIII: The King and His Court, 2002, etc.) falters with a dull attempt to discover who ordered the death of Mary Stuart’s husband in 1567.
At the time, it was widely assumed that Mary was complicit in the killing, which rid her of a detested, politically maladroit spouse and cleared the way for marriage to her lover, the Earl of Bothwell. Not so, declares Weir, naming as the prime instigators Mary’s Secretary of State, William Maitland, and her half-brother the Earl of Moray, bastard son of Scotland’s James V. Aided by much of Scotland’s Protestant nobility, they lured Bothwell into the murder plot, she asserts, planning to make him the scapegoat, to discredit Mary and force her to abdicate so they could become the powers behind the throne of her infant son James. This is plausible, but Weir’s primary goal is to clear Mary of any involvement. Examining the documentary evidence in stupefying detail, she dismisses the notorious Casket Letters, which seemed to prove Mary’s guilt, as combinations of forgery and alterations to existing letters; this argument is considerably more convincing than her denial that Mary and Bothwell were lovers before Darnley’s death. Weir’s own narrative shows Mary well aware that some threat to her husband was afoot and doing little to forestall it. We observe throughout that the Queen of Scots was a lousy politician with remarkably poor judgment, in striking contrast to England’s Queen Elizabeth, who played the messy Scottish scandal to her advantage. (Mary wound up imprisoned in England and was executed in 1587 for conspiring against Elizabeth.) Weir assesses the possibility that Elizabeth’s secretary of state had a hand in Darnley’s murder, or at least knew who the perpetrators were, at a level of detail that would have made the whole study more readable had it been applied to the Scottish portions as well. She entirely fails to make the case that Mary was “one of the most wronged women in history.”
Strictly for those who like their murder mysteries ancient and peopled by aristocrats.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-43658-X
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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