A vivid portrait of citizens who gave priority to day-to-day lives but rarely forgot they were engaged in the greatest war...
A fascinating account of how Britons lived through a generation of war.
Despite painful memories of defeat in the United States six years earlier, Britons welcomed the 1789 French Revolution, writes British historian Uglow (A Gambling Man: Charles II’s Restoration Game, 2009, etc.). Finally, they believed, France was coming to its senses and becoming like England: a constitutional monarchy with a parliament and liberty. The 1793 guillotining of Louis XVI quickly changed almost everyone’s minds. France resumed its role as the traditional enemy but with an overlay similar to the panic in the U.S following 9/11. The Jacobins and, later, Napoleon were considered loathsome yet fiendishly clever, bent on destroying British liberties either through invasion, spies, subversion or simply by encouraging unpatriotic attacks on the government. Yet Britain around 1800 was an imperfect democracy with a tiny electorate ruled by an aristocratic elite with few constitutional guarantees of liberty. Despite this, leaders could not ignore popular opinion and a pugnacious press, and even poor Britons considered themselves the world’s freest people; slavery, Uglow reminds readers, was illegal on the island. Despite high taxes, painful shortages, hunger and oppressive censorship, they endured for 22 years, but they did not suffer in silence. Immortals (Jane Austen, Byron, Wordsworth, Pitt, Wellington) have their say, but mostly Uglow delves into the immense archives of letters, journals, books and editorials from a highly opinionated cross section of farmers, shopkeepers, bankers, clergy, seamen, entrepreneurs, journalism and peers. “[The wars] affected everyone, sometimes directly, and sometimes almost without their knowing it,” writes the author, “and in the process the underlying structures of British society ground against each other and slowly shifted, like the invisible movement of tectonic plates.”
A vivid portrait of citizens who gave priority to day-to-day lives but rarely forgot they were engaged in the greatest war in history.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-0374280901
Page Count: 752
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
HISTORY | MODERN | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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