Not for readers seeking innovative analysis but a perfectly solid and sometimes-entertaining overview of the great men who...
Acclaimed popular historian and novelist Fraser (My History: A Memoir of Growing Up, 2015, etc.) rehearses the half-century of maneuvering that culminated in the 1829 liberation of English and Irish Catholics from crushing de jure discrimination.
In 18th-century England, Catholics were a thoroughly oppressed minority. Despite the easing of some restrictions in 1778, in the early 19th century, new members of Parliament were required to swear an anti-Catholic oath. How was the government persuaded to pass “An Act for the Relief of His Majesty’s Roman Catholic Subjects” (1829), which was, in the words of one Catholic cardinal, “to us what the egress from the catacombs was to the Christians”? Fraser’s cast of characters won’t surprise readers familiar with the outlines of the story: Her three stars are Irish Catholic activist Daniel O’Connell (who, despite insisting that “ours is a moral not a physical force,” likened himself to Simón Bolívar) and, in Downing Street, the Duke of Wellington and Robert Peel, pragmatic politicians who served, respectively, as Prime Minister and Home Secretary. Both eventually championed Catholic Emancipation not out of a sudden love of Rome but because they feared that if they did not, “we must look to civil war in Ireland sooner or later” (as the Duke wrote to Peel in 1824). The supporting cast of anti-Catholic bigots included William Wordsworth, various Archbishops of Canterbury, and Mrs. Arbuthnot, a salon hostess who seems to have stepped out of a Trollope novel (it’s disappointing that Fraser didn’t make more use of Arbuthnot’s pungent two-volume diary). Though marred by the occasional cliché (“these were…fighting words”), Fraser’s account is salted with delicious details. For example, speaking in Parliament against emancipation, Attorney-General Charles Wetherell (who may have been drunk) gesticulated so aggressively that his suspenders broke and his pants started to fall down.
Not for readers seeking innovative analysis but a perfectly solid and sometimes-entertaining overview of the great men who brought about vital political change in Britain.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-385-54452-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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
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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