A wonderfully thorough history of the Scots that thankfully avoids dwelling on stories that have been explored countless...
Porter (Katherine the Queen: The Remarkable Life of Katherine Parr, the Last Wife of Henry VIII, 2010) again draws from her exhaustive knowledge of 16th-century British history to explain the strong ties that eventually united Scotland and England.
The squabble between Mary Queen of Scots and Queen Elizabeth had deep roots and a long history. Beginning with the ascent of Henry VII in 1485 and the start of the Tudor dynasty, the author explains the many threats against his reign, including imposters, uprisings and constant border skirmishes. In the most important royal marriage of the century, Henry sent his daughter, Margaret, to marry the future James IV, the first step toward union. Margaret was second in line to the English throne, after her brother, Henry VIII, who also wished to impair the “Auld Alliance between France and Scotland.” Porter clearly shows the ways in which Scotland was used by the English and French against each other, always at the expense of the Scots. James died at Flodden in 1513 in a diversionary attack intended to draw the English away from their attack on France. By that time, Henry VIII reigned and was bent on recovering England’s territories in France. Regents ruled for James V until he wed Mary of Guise in 1538. That union produced Mary Queen of Scots, widowed Dauphine of France who, at age 24, was a deposed queen facing 19 years of imprisonment. Her son united Scotland and England in 1603.
A wonderfully thorough history of the Scots that thankfully avoids dwelling on stories that have been explored countless times before—especially fitting now as Scotland decides whether to withdraw from the union with England.Pub Date: July 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-312-59074-1
Page Count: 544
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
