A sweeping, encyclopedic history of the arrogance, ambition, and ideology that fueled the quest for empire.
A celebration of Spain’s prowess and reach.
Award-winning British historian Thomas (The Golden Empire: Spain, Charles V, and the Creation of America, 2011, etc.) ends his trilogy on the Spanish Empire with a densely (and sometimes dizzyingly) populated, overwhelmingly detailed narrative focused on the “dedicated and cultivated” Philip II, who reigned from 1556 to 1598, during which Spain consolidated its holdings in Mexico, South America, and the Philippines. By 1600, Thomas writes admiringly, Spain “controlled the largest collection of territories the world had seen since the fall of the Roman empire.” The conquest was expedited by the “valour and imagination” of conquistadors as well as the determination of missionaries, especially Jesuits, “high-minded men of intelligence capable of sacrifice, endurance, and patience,” who founded an unprecedented number of schools, churches, hospitals, and convents. In contrast were some of Philip’s deputies: greedy and violent, they cruelly exploited indigenous peoples and African slaves. Among the problems these administrators faced were the spread of smallpox, typhus, measles, and influenza that decimated the native population and, therefore, the workforce; internecine struggles; piracy; the threat of slave rebellion; and emigrés who included vagrants, beggars, thieves, debtors, and fortune hunters hoping to loot the riches of the New World. Although most missionaries focused on education and condemned torture, some unleashed bloody punishment for idolatry. The colonial quest is no better exemplified than by Spain’s bold plan to invade and conquer China, seen as “a well-managed, vast, rich land with stone-walled cities” and an easily-subdued population that “would welcome the conquerors as liberators” from the ruling Ming emperors, a comment likely to resonate chillingly with readers. Although the plan never came to fruition, Thomas suggests, “had it happened, it would surely have brought less deprivation to China than occurred under the Manchu dynasty and…the terrible communist era.”
A sweeping, encyclopedic history of the arrogance, ambition, and ideology that fueled the quest for empire.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9811-5
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
HISTORY | MILITARY | 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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