British historian Gilmour (The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj, 2006, etc.) declares there’s no such thing as Italy.
Or rather, he argues in this idiosyncratic text, the 19th-century unification of the Italian peninsula into a single nation ignored the reality of its distinct city-states and regions with long separate histories and little in common. To make his point, Gilmour begins in prehistory, pointing out that geography works against national unity, with an enormous coastline that has enabled invasions for millennia and a spine of central mountains that hinder travel between communities. The author sweeps across the centuries from Republican Rome through the Renaissance (largely confined to the north) to unification, which Gilmour describes as "a war of expansion conducted by one Italian state against another.” The state that came out on top of “the Kingdom of Italy” was Piedmont, whose Savoia dynasty had scarcely more claim to rule the nation than the Bourbons who had ruled the Kingdom of Two Sicilies for more than a century. Gilmour delights in such counterintuitive proclamations, and sometimes he appears to be dissenting from mainstream history simply for the sake of being different. (It seems absurd, for example, to quibble with the perception that Verdi’s operas expressed nationalist sentiments, a belief widespread among the composer’s contemporaries as well as biographers, by pointing out that Nabucco is actually about Hebrew slaves in Babylon.) Nonetheless, the book’s main point is well taken: Nationalism Italian-style was more of a 19th-century fad than a true expression of the sentiments of people for whom campanilismo (loyalty to the municipality) has always been the stronger, more enduring force. This is “the real Italy,” Gilmour persuasively contends, “the communal Italy, the result of a millennium of natural evolution.” His scathing summary of 20th-century Italian history—from the bankrupt liberalism that handed over power to Mussolini through a half-century of corrupt one-party rule to the antics of Berlusconi—makes it hard to disagree that regional states could only be an improvement. Provocative, if at times somewhat speciously argued.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-28316-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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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