Energetic and comprehensive.
Contextually sweeping history of the gloriously infamous Tudor era.
Unlike the somewhat ponderous British biographies of the Henrys, Elizabeths and Boleyns that seem to pop up perennially, Meyer (A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918, 2006, etc.) displays some flashy, fresh irreverence. The author never loses track of the lay reader, extracting the most plausible theories from the academics without belaboring the points, while offering alternating chapters within his narrative on pertinent topics of 16th-century English society and government that aid in filling in the landscape. Meyer’s aim is to clear out some of the lace and tulle that Hollywood has wound around the Tudors. The author covers Henry Tudor, a Welsh commoner who by sheer luck won the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 and was crowned king when Richard III was slain from his horse; Henry’s arrogant, profligate second son, Henry VIII, whose pampered later years turned him into a tyrant and “monster”; and the Tudor apotheosis personified by the wily, vain, intelligent Elizabeth I. Meyer subverts the now rather ho-hum custom of chronological storytelling by cutting to the quick of the action, then ambling backward to fill in the details. The author is clear that the lives of Tudors were “studded with acts of atrocious cruelty and false dealing,” but they make for highly entertaining stories. Meyer also provides intriguing profiles of the era’s many other interesting characters, including Thomas Wolsey, Elizabeth Barton, Luther, Calvin, Thomas More and numerous popes.
Energetic and comprehensive.Pub Date: March 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-34076-2
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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