An eye poke for stiff-upper-lip monarchists, but good for many grins among the less worshipful of England’s royals.
A British comedian and actor puts forth a goofy look at the English monarchs.
“We seem to need the trappings of monarchical continuity in order to reflect contentedly upon ourselves, just as we need alcohol in order to socialize,” writes Mitchell early on. “The English have more to fear from republicanism than most—we risk losing our skimpy sense of self….The English tradition of kings and queens has a lot riding on it and a lot to answer for.” His opening monarch is Arthur, who, he argues, never existed, at least not in any of the guises that have been imagined for him. Describing who he might have been, the author writes, “someone like that, the idea goes, might have been the bit of real grit in the imagination oyster that turned into the Arthurian pearl. Personally, I don’t think imagination oysters need real grit any more than metaphorical bonnets need real bees.” There was a real Edward the Confessor, there was an Edward I, and there were Plantagenets and Tudors. In Mitchell’s eyes, all of them were complex failures. Many were bloodthirsty—“Apart from seizing the throne and having his nephews murdered, Richard seems comparatively nice”—and many inept, many more, writes the author, were both. He closes his account at the end of the bloodiest periods of history, reminding us that while the Spanish Armada is a key moment in English memory, it’s forgotten that Queen Elizabeth sent a fleet to Spain the next year with equally calamitous results. Indeed, because the book ends so early, one hopes for a sequel bringing us up to date. As it is, Mitchell’s book is a sardonic, endlessly funny update to the classic 1066 and All That.
An eye poke for stiff-upper-lip monarchists, but good for many grins among the less worshipful of England’s royals.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9780593728482
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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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