Well written and exactingly researched, of much appeal for professional historians and general readers with an interest in...
Wide-ranging survey considers Spain’s conquest of much of the Americas in the light of conditions and developments back home.
Kamen (The Spanish Inquisition, 1998, etc.) amplifies here his previously stated view that the Spanish military adventure in the New World was Spanish in name only; it relied on legions of foreign mercenaries, Catholics displaced from Protestant lands in rebellion, and would-be Crusaders, all of whom served in far greater numbers than Spaniards themselves. It relied, too, on the cooperation of conquered peoples. The Spanish assumed control of local polities, Kamen notes, by “placing themselves at the top in the place previously occupied by the Aztecs and Incas” but otherwise leaving the pyramid of power largely intact. The process of conquest helped Spain forge itself as a nation; where formerly it had been a congeries of small kingdoms united only provisionally by the task of driving out the Moors, in the face of the common goal of subduing faraway lands “the Galician, the proud Asturian and the rude inhabitant of the Pyrenees,” in the words of a contemporary observer, joined with fighters from Castile, La Mancha, and Andalusia to create something new: Spain. This is a history of large forces moving sometimes of their own accord and by their own logic: the institutions, for example, that slowly replaced adventurers and conquistadors with bureaucrats, and the elaborate trade networks that developed to cart off and distribute all that New World loot to a waiting Europe. Kamen does a fine job of answering such thorny questions as: “Who gave the men, who supplied the credit, who arranged the transactions, who built the ships, who made the guns?”
Well written and exactingly researched, of much appeal for professional historians and general readers with an interest in the world-systems view of things.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-019476-6
Page Count: 640
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2003
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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