Occasionally slow-going, but burbles with personalities and ideas of the Restoration age.
British historian Uglow (Nature’s Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick, 2007, etc.) attempts to organize the bemusing Stuart Restoration period into tidy compartments.
How did the son of the murdered tyrant Charles I return to England in triumph more than a decade after his father’s beheading, then stay securely in power for 25 years? The author considers the makeup of this singular historical character, a man both affable and canny, whose period in exile forced him to assume the persona of a regular nobleman, ingratiate himself in foreign capitals and open himself to new ideas. Charles was above all a performer in an age of masks, Uglow writes, a monarch on the cusp of the Enlightenment. The author divides her exploration of Charles’s kingly life into the four suits of a deck of cards—clubs, diamonds, hearts, spades—and depicts how he played each well or poorly: regulating constitutional issues, deciding the fate of the army, mollifying religious animosities, punishing the leaders of the regicide, rehabilitating Whitehall into a royal residence and juggling his new queen, the Portuguese Infanta Catherine, with his numerous mistresses. The categories grow rather messy, as plague and the London fire devastated the country during the decade. Moreover, Charles dragged the country into war with the Dutch and urged religious toleration probably out of his own Catholic sympathies, while impoverishing the country by keeping up with his cousin in France, Louis XIV. However, Charles was passionate about the theater, giving rise to the witty, ribald Restoration comedies of the period, and scientific inquiry, spurred by his childhood tutor Thomas Hobbes, thus establishing the Royal Society. Uglow provides a labored but ultimately entertaining view of the richly intricate tapestry of this era.
Occasionally slow-going, but burbles with personalities and ideas of the Restoration age.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-374-28137-3
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2009
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
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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