A compelling trek through English history in the company of some remarkable women.
How the little-known queens of England’s early history contributed to the nation’s political stability—or didn’t.
In this vast, rigorous text, Hilton (Athenais: The Life of Louis XIV’s Mistress, the Real Queen of France, 2002) includes an impressive bibliography, and the reading experience requires frequent switchbacks and consultations of family trees (mercifully provided). The narrative encompasses the lives of queens from William the Conqueror’s wife, Matilda of Flanders, whose alliances were key to his success at Hastings in 1066, to Elizabeth of York, who had been designated as a bride for her uncle Richard III, until the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 heralded the triumph of Henry VII and the end of the medieval era. The author is fascinated by the things that set these women apart among their sex: their “sacred capital“; their legal rights (they could manage their own affairs, while most females other than widows had to submit to masculine authority); their uncommon education; their piety and the cult of maternity associating them with the Virgin Mary. Hilton examines the double standard that depicted assertive queens as unbecomingly masculine viragos. Strategically tracing tangled hereditary strains, the narrative moves from the rule of the Normans and the Angevins to the “apogee of English queenship” under the very literate Matilda of Scotland and later Matilda of Boulogne, who was adored by her husband, King Stephen. Foreign queens from the South included the exceptionally powerful Eleanor of Aquitaine, who overcame stifling 12th-century strictures to become a formidable politician, and a terrifying mother-in-law. During the turbulent period of the Plantagenet monarchs, the extraordinary Isabella of France first deposed her husband’s probable homosexual lover and then King Edward II himself in order to install her son on the throne. The book closes with the feud between the houses of Lancaster and York, painting a touching portrait of the love match between commoner Elizabeth Woodville and Edward IV.
A compelling trek through English history in the company of some remarkable women.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60598-105-5
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
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 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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