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
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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