An engaging political history and affectionate homage.
An eminent British historian weaves a vivid tapestry of France’s past.
Capping a prolific writing and broadcasting career, Norwich (Four Princes: Henry VIII, Francis I, Charles V, Suleiman the Magnificent and the Obsession that Forged Modern Europe, 2016, etc.) deftly distills the history of France from the Gauls to de Gaulle. He gallops through the first 1,500 years of his story, peopled, he writes, with few “particularly colourful characters” though many devastating conflicts, particularly the Hundred Years’ War, protracted by the reign of a “hopelessly insane” king, Charles VI. The author dispatches in a mere three pages the intrepid advent and fiery end of Joan of Arc. Finally, arriving at 1515, Norwich finds a character “to make the heart beat faster”: the remarkable Francis I, who, Norwich exclaims, “hit France like a rocket.” He counts Francis I, a lover of books, the arts, and, not least, women, and Louis XIV, the Sun King, who reigned from 1643 to 1715, as France’s “two most dazzling rulers,” indelibly stamping the nation’s culture and identity. Before, after, and between them, however, were greedy, inept, ill-advised, and clumsy rulers whose escapades, travails, marriages—and many, many mistresses—Norwich chronicles with verve and wit. After Francis I, the nation roiled with religious wars between Catholics and Huguenots, which ended, after nearly half a century, in 1598 with the Edict of Nantes. It was not the end of France’s involvement in wars, however. There was the Thirty Years’ War, “the deadliest and most brutal upheaval the continent had ever seen,” beginning in 1618; the Seven Years’ War, lasting from 1756 to 1763; the Revolution and commune at the end of the 18th century; Napoleon’s extraordinary military campaigns; and two world wars. The author ascribes his love of France to childhood travels there with his mother, Lady Diana Cooper, and living in France when his father, Duff Cooper, was ambassador in the 1940s. This book, he writes, is “a sort of thank-offering to France.”
An engaging political history and affectionate homage.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2890-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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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