A wonderful picture of 17th-century England, replete with the excitement of ideas and discoveries and the beginnings of the...
A history of the England that Charles II returned to in 1660 when he was restored to the throne.
As Jordan (co-author: The King's Bed: Ambition and Intimacy in the Court of Charles II, 2016, etc.) shows in a lively history of an eventful period, the changes imposed by Oliver Cromwell and the Commonwealth were mostly erased. Charles wanted nothing to do with the impositions put on the theater, arts, literature, and sciences. When he returned to the throne, his Declaration of Breda set out the terms of the restoration of the monarchy. The restoration agreement didn’t spell out the constitutional arrangement of governance, leaving the way open for Charles to attempt to renew the divine right of the king. The city was ready to throw off Puritan shackles and hoped for a more pro-parliament political stability. More playboy than king, Charles lacked talent in statecraft. It was an age of transformation, and Charles was constantly demanding money to fund his many mistresses and high tastes. This led him and his brother, the Duke of York, into the lucrative slave trade, as well as trade with India, helped along by his wife’s dowry, which included Bombay. It was a desperate time as well. The twin disasters of plague and the great fire destroyed most of the city. The plague took 20 percent of the population, mostly the poor, who had no country houses to offer refuge, and the fire leveled most of London. Given the chance to redesign and rebuild, Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke, and Peter Mills stepped up with plans at the ready. It was also a great time for discovery. The Royal Society was founded and led by scientists like Newton, Locke, Hobbes, and even Margaret Cavendish. It was the end of Medieval London and beginning of a modern city, with Samuel Pepys recording it all in his diary.
A wonderful picture of 17th-century England, replete with the excitement of ideas and discoveries and the beginnings of the empire.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68177-638-5
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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