Amateurish, sure, but if with this, Fields can turn America’s attention from entertainment gossip to Shakespeare, more power...
Hollywood entertainment lawyer Fields (Royal Blood, 1998; aka D. Kincaid, The Lawyer’s Tale, 1992, etc.) dabbles in literary criticism by sifting through the elusive evidence of Shakespeare’s probable identity, in a compelling work for the lay reader, woefully lacking in documentation.
Two puzzling identities fail to square in this long-standing literary mystery: The “Stratford man,” as Fields calls him, who hailed from provincial Stratford-upon-Avon, probably didn’t receive more than a grammar school education, married young and left his family to become an actor of some repute in London before returning home to die in relative obscurity in 1616; and the author of the Shakespeare canon, who demonstrated a vast knowledge of foreign lands, history, languages, military and legal affairs, and arcane and insider usages available only to the aristocracy. Patiently, Fields lines up the key issues in the debate—the Stratford man’s will, the mysteriously funded Stratford monument, the publication of the First Folio in 1623—and attacks them from both sides, the “Stratfordians” versus the “anti-Strats,” scholars who’ve been obsessed with this very matter throughout the centuries and whom Fields names occasionally, though without offering specific works or notes. After a blazing excursus through Stuart Tudor history, he examines the evidence of what the Stratford man knew versus what Shakespeare knew, the Stratford man’s nearly illiterate handwriting, the sexual orientations of the two, and their “outlook” on religion, politics and life in general. The Stratford man makes a poor showing, indeed, and though Fields claims to withhold judgment until all the evidence is in, he makes a most striking case for Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. He also presents cogent chapters on other plausible candidates, even Queen Elizabeth. His theory of the true authorship is dazzling but fails to consider how, with so many conspirators in the mix, the truth could have been kept from leaking.
Amateurish, sure, but if with this, Fields can turn America’s attention from entertainment gossip to Shakespeare, more power to him.Pub Date: March 15, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-077559-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
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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