Capably recounting a forgotten episode in European history, Roper’s book is full of lessons for modern readers.
History of a great peasant uprising during the heart of the Reformation.
The German Peasants’ War of 1525, writes Roper, “was the greatest popular uprising in Western Europe before the French Revolution.” As the Oxford historian recounts, the uprising was fueled by Martin Luther’s concurrent revolt against the Catholic Church, although its roots as a movement of resistance against feudalism began far earlier. In the end, Luther’s call for freedom did not extend to the poor, and the theologian sided with the lords in a season of repression that ended with the deaths of as many as 100,000 peasants. That the Reformation was entwined with the Peasants’ War was in large measure because the Catholic Church was itself a feudal power, with estates that demanded free labor and shares of the harvest on the part of a peasantry already beset by low crop yields during the Little Ice Age. The revolt led to the collapse of monastic political power in many parts of Germany. In some instances the equerry sided with the peasantry, but the lords were naturally in a better position to fund and field armies to crush the revolt. Crushed the revolt soon was, though not without results: Feudalism effectively ended in Germany, while “after the war, the Reformation and the resultant secularisation, dissolution, and simple closure of so many monasteries and convents accomplished one of the greatest transfers of land and property ever seen in the German region.” As Roper writes in her worthy rejoinder to Norman Cohn’s classic Pursuit of the Millennium, whereas in England most clerical wealth landed in the hands of the nobility, in Germany it “increased the power of the state,” as manifested in the founding of schools and universities, social service agencies, and the like.
Capably recounting a forgotten episode in European history, Roper’s book is full of lessons for modern readers.Pub Date: yesterday
ISBN: 9781541647053
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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
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