An absorbing narrative that shifts the focus from monarchs to rebels.
A bloody history of treachery and retribution told with zest.
Jordan and Walsh (The King’s Bed: Ambition and Intimacy in the Court of Charles II, 2016, etc.) follow their examination of Charles II’s sexual escapades with a close look at his career after claiming the throne in 1660. Vowing revenge, Charles set out “to chase, pursue, kill and destroy” the 59 men who executed his father. The authors reprise the downfall of Charles I, who ruled tyrannically, incurring the wrath of Parliament, the gentry, and the aristocracy, inciting many to question the legitimacy of the monarchy. Civil wars ensued, resulting in the rise of Oliver Cromwell as “Lord Protector for life.” Cromwell’s reign—he staged his own coronation—infuriated his enemies. When he died in 1658 from malaria (he “had survived myriad battles, intrigues and assassination plots only to be laid low by an insect”), Charles II saw his chance to return from exile. The authors characterize Charles as a cynical pragmatist who handily quashed his opponents, claimed the property and estates of those he identified as threats, and refused any compromise to his royal power. He was not beloved: among his detractors was John Milton, who bitterly condemned a restored monarchy. Edmund Burke derided Charles as “dissolute, false, venal, and destitute of any positive good quality whatsoever.” Still, Burke noted, England yearned for a king, to promote “peace and liberty.” As king, Charles displayed traits “developed over long years of exile and futility”: predilection for philandering, inattentiveness to governing, and laziness. His court was “wonderfully corrupt and licentious.” The authors chronicle the arrest of the regicides and their sensational mass trial, and they focus especially on the lives of 20 fugitives in America and Europe, eluding capture by Charles’s henchmen. The authors praise the “odd coalition” of regicides as “men of principle” who ushered in Britain’s modern constitutional monarchy.
An absorbing narrative that shifts the focus from monarchs to rebels.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-68177-168-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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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