Entrancing historical interpretation, perfectly cast. (Color and b&w illus.)
Noted historian Norwich (Byzantium, 1989, etc.) takes a brilliantly nuanced look at the relations between England’s kings
and Shakespeare’s plays. Studying only the plays known collectively as the "histories" (and thus omitting King John), he uses his immense knowledge of English and European history to illuminate the historical background of the plays and to offer an intriguing look at England in the years of Shakespeare’s writing. Norwich’s analysis of Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI, and Richard III emphasizes factors Shakespeare added for dramatic effect (such as the famed "winter of our discontent" speech, written for Richard III to deliver during the summer of 1477) and his equally strategic omissions (e.g., the bands of idle soldiers roaming through the English countryside in 1414 whom Henry V would have to employ in a war so as to avert the unrest they would otherwise cause at home). Norwich notes other realities Shakespeare recast more subtly, transforming France’s Charles VI from a doddering fool to a wise voice of reason against the rash voice of Louis, the Dauphin, for example, in order to portray Henry V’s war against France as just and reasonable. And he reminds us that the historical Richard III was not the hunchback of Shakespeare but a "great and good man of perfectly normal physique, the fine administrator and far-sighted law giver."
Entrancing historical interpretation, perfectly cast. (Color and b&w illus.)Pub Date: March 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-81434-X
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2000
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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