Seward is a good author to turn to for ease in reading history; his writing style is quick, vibrant and delightfully pithy...
Historian Seward (The Last White Rose: The Secret Wars of the Tudors, 2014) again serves up a neat, clear view of an English dynasty—this time, the Plantagenets.
Turning to as many contemporary sources as possible, the author in particular initially quotes the chronicles of Matthew Paris and Roger of Wendover, monks of St. Albans, a well-placed monastery at the intersection of two of England’s busiest roads, who witnessed history unfolding. The author deftly covers 300 years of English history and more than a dozen kings, noting how, due to a “multicultural world” that is “embarrassed by patriotic history…the Plantagenets have faded from people’s memory.” Readers well-versed in Plantagenet history will delight in the efficient completeness of this narrative. The author covers most of the bases, although a bit more attention might have been paid to Eleanor of Aquitaine, one of history’s strongest women. Seward succinctly chronicles the successes and failures of these kings, from Henry II’s manic energy to Edward II’s complete uselessness to Henry V’s heroic victories over the French. The author also recounts the immense changes that took place in the world during the time period, beginning with Henry II’s accession in 1154 and ending with the great age of exploration that began in 1492, just seven years after the fall of Richard III at Bosworth. During that time, England twice gained and lost vast lands in France, fought the Hundred Years’ War against the same, and alternately subdued and surrendered to the Scots, Irish and Welsh. The bitter civil war between the Lancaster and York families finally ended with Henry Tudor’s ascension and unification of the families.
Seward is a good author to turn to for ease in reading history; his writing style is quick, vibrant and delightfully pithy in its simplicity of phrase.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60598-618-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
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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