Wroe, who studied medieval history at Oxford and is now the American editor of the Economist, uses a real-life 14th-century mystery as a ``springboard'' for an intimate, well-crafted profile of late medieval life in the town of Rodez in southwest France. In 1369 or 1370, a somewhat down-and-out man named Peyre Marques of Rodez calls in masons to investigate a blocked drain in his house. They soon get to the root of the problem: an impacted jug filled with gold coins, which is claimed by Marques's brother- in-law. To whom do the jug and the gold treasure really belong? Wroe doesn't solve the mystery, but she reveals much about life in Rodez. Actually, Rodez is comprised of two towns: the City, with its imposing cathedral and clerical domination, and the Burg, with its entrepreneurial hustle and bustle. One is allied with England, the other with France, and their officials compete fiercely in collecting taxes and fees on everything from meat to funerals. Basing her work on a trove of town documents in Latin and Occitan (a mixture of French and Catalan), Wroe uncovers aspects of daily life that seem astonishingly contemporary. Think the O.J. trial has dragged on? In Rodez, a trial over a case of suspected arson still was being litigated 50 years after the incident occurred. Think heartlessness towards the homeless is new? In 1375, the French town's council resolved that ``there should be a very strict watch day and night and . . . poor men who are already here should be thrown out.'' And for all the Middle Ages' reputation for religiosity, Wroe reveals the dark underside of the Church. She might have, however, provided more political and socioeconomic background on the world beyond Rodez and maps locating Rodez in France and depicting the town itself. These small flaws aside, this is an equally informative and entertaining work, one that will be a delight not only to medievalists, but to all who wish a respite from the pace, technology, and other perplexities of contemporary life.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8090-4595-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1995
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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