A nuanced and much-needed survey of a critically important episode in world history.
A sterling account of Spain’s creation of a vast empire, one that “lasted more than three hundred years, more than the British, the French, the Dutch, or the Russian equivalents.”
The Spanish empire, writes Thomas (The Slave Trade, 1997, etc.), was born in a time of pitched warfare between a resurgent Christian nobility and the last of the Muslim rulers in Western Europe. Defeating the viziers of Al-Andalus required forging strong links among several Iberian kingdoms, whence the wedding of Isabel of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon and, in the wake of civil war, the formation of “a national nobility with patriotic loyalties.” Following the expulsion or forced conversion of the last of the Muslims (and, for good measure, the Jews) of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabel quickly translated their peripatetic court into renewed maritime explorations in all directions, completing the subjugation of the Canary Islands, establishing African entrepôts, and funding the first voyage of Christopher Columbus. All this is a story that has been told many times (and with considerable disagreement) in the scholarly literature, but that has not been well covered in popular writing on the conquest of the New World. Writing with a scholar’s concern for details and a storyteller’s skill, Thomas provides memorable portraits of the principal figures in this tangled history: Isabel, a severe woman who “had a taste for irony”; Columbus, who was less a monster than some recent histories would have us think; Francisco de Bobadilla, a colonial administrator who enjoyed the Spanish rulers’ confidence until imprisoning Columbus on trumped-up charges, then was relieved of command of Santo Domingo even though he “thought that he was doing well and was making money for the Crown”; Vasco Nuñez de Balboa, who told amazing tales about rivers of gold and instant-growing cucumbers; and a host of other servants of Spain who “made their conquests with a clear conscience, certain that they were taking with them civilization.”
A nuanced and much-needed survey of a critically important episode in world history.Pub Date: June 8, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-50204-1
Page Count: 832
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
HISTORY | HISTORY | WORLD | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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