A comprehensive and unusual look at England’s most famous queen.
Fields (Shylock: His Own Story, 2015, etc.) tackles the knowns and unknowns of England’s Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) in this work of history.
Elizabeth I, aka “Gloriana” and “the Virgin Queen,” was a colorful figure at the center of an eventful period in English history who still manages to stimulate the popular imagination more than 400 years after her death. This wide-ranging biography’s first section is a breathless account that spans the entire Tudor dynasty from the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 to the ascension of James I in 1603, with the requisite reiteration of Elizabeth’s rise to power, her completion of England’s break from the Catholic Church, the war with Spain, and her constantly evolving entourage of advisers, favorites, and paramours. The second section of the book, “Elizabethan Enigmas,” is organized by topic as Fields delves into the curios of Elizabeth’s life. Was she truly a virgin? Did she sanction the murder of the wife of nobleman Robert Dudley? What were her true thoughts on Catholicism? In other chapters, such as “Duplicity,” “Miserliness,” and “Piracy and Worse,” Fields introduces readers to aspects of the queen that they may not have heard before. The concision and comprehensiveness of the first section are impressive, and its brevity and quick pacing keep it from getting bogged down in minutiae the way that biographies of monarchs often do. Fields’ true interest seems to lie in the second section’s subject matter, though, and his enthusiasm is infectious. Without humoring outright conspiracy theories—he dismisses the idea that she wrote Shakespeare’s plays with the terse statement, “She did write well; but not that well”—Fields finds plenty of intrigues to challenge conventional notions of the queen. Twelve beautiful, full-color portraits from the National Portrait Gallery in London and a timeline of the queen’s life round out this volume. Its 450-plus pages belie what a quick read it actually is, making it a perfect primer for those interested in the “Good Queen Bess” but who may be intimidated by some of the longer tomes available.
A comprehensive and unusual look at England’s most famous queen.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 451
Publisher: Marmont Lane
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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