In this limpidly written, absorbing text, British historian Marsden recreates the vanished world of Celtic Christianity and the devastating impact upon Hiberno-British monasticism of the first Viking raids. ``From the fury of the Northmen, O Lord, deliver us,'' prayed the monks of Ireland, England, and Scotland during the early Viking Age. Irish monasticism spread rapidly in the British Isles from the sixth through the eighth centuries. Marsden begins his account with the disastrous raid on one of the holiest monasteries of all, the church and shrine of St. Cuthbert on the island of Lindisfarne in 793. Marsden indicates that this first recorded attack upon a Celtic monastery by the pagan Norsemen shook the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic civilizations to their foundations, as churchmen asked whether the Lindisfarne raid presaged further scourges at the hands of an angry God: ``What should be expected,'' the great Northumbrian scholar Alcuin asked in anguish, ``for other places, when the divine judgment has not spared this holy place?'' A similar fate befell monasteries on Inishmurray and Inishbofin, I-Columcille on Iona, and Inis Patraic, among other places. The escalation of such raids over the next 30 years and the waves of Viking settlement that followed them ultimately transformed Irish and British society, little changed from the time of St. Patrick four centuries earlier. By the time the great Anglo-Saxon king Alfred of Wessex checked Viking rule in England in the late ninth century, Norse customs, names, and place names had become commonplace in British and Irish society, while the descendants of the Northmen, Christianized and settled, became assimilated and absorbed into the Irish and British populations. A fascinating look at a transformative event in the history of the British Isles.
Pub Date: May 16, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-13080-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995
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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