A vivid, concise recounting of a pivotal era in medieval history. (11 maps)
The first US edition of an essential account of the Albigensian wars and the medieval cultural conflicts they embodied.
The Cathars (nicknamed Albigensians after the town of Albi, a stronghold for the cult) were a sect that broke away from Catholicism, adopting a dualist theology in which the earth and all matter were believed to have been the creation of the Devil. Theological differences, however, were not the only cause for the rapid rise of the Cathars in the 12th century. British historian Sumption (Trial by Fire, not reviewed) evokes the intense local cultures that existed within the boundaries of present-day France: the southern region of Languedoc, for example, bore less cultural kinship with northern France than Germany did. By the 13th century, however, the courtly and elegant society that produced the great troubadour poets was crumbling, lacking a central authority or secure alliances among the various noble households. The Cathars found a receptive audience for their ascetic and anti-authoritarian doctrines among the peasants and artisans of the small towns in the region, thereby provoking a furious reaction from the Vatican. Sumption handles the drama of these events with real flair, vividly recounting the murders and machinations that followed the Church’s initial salvos, the escalation of the campaign to suppress the heretics into a full-scale crusade, and the remarkable career of the opportunist crusader Simon de Montfort. The Church-sponsored armies waged a successful initial campaign against the poorly equipped and impoverished Albigensians, but antagonisms among the southern nobility continued to smolder, culminating in a battle between Montfort and his archrival, Raymond VI of Foix. Sumption deftly integrates the underlying social conditions into his narrative and succeeds in making it clear that, without diminishing the extraordinary events or personalities involved, the real significance of the Crusade lay in the lasting impact it had on the lives of ordinary people.
A vivid, concise recounting of a pivotal era in medieval history. (11 maps)Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-571-20002-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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 Yorkerstaff 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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