The result is a traditional politics-and-war biography: a relentless succession of intrigues, quarrels, battles, sieges,...
King John (1166-1216) is a rare English medieval monarch whose fame owes less to Shakespeare than legend. His villainy remains so ingrained, writes historian and broadcaster Morris (The Norman Conquest: The Battle of Hastings and the Fall of Anglo-Saxon England, 2013) in this capable biography, that no subsequent king has named a son “John.”
John was the youngest son of Henry II (1133-1189), an illustrious monarch who spent much of his reign fighting John’s three rebellious elder brothers, largely ignoring John. On Henry’s death, two brothers were also dead, and John was old enough to consider himself heir to Richard I. Richard did not always agree, and John alternatively cooperated and engaged in frankly treasonous rebellion. Upon Richard’s death, John’s realm included Ireland, Wales, and half of France. “In 1203,” writes the author, “King John was the ruler of a vast international empire….By any measure, his was the most important and powerful dominion in Europe.” By his death, he had lost most of it and was losing a civil war with his English barons, who had forced him to sign the Magna Carta two years earlier. Historians agree on John’s political incompetence, but his treachery and cruelty were only modestly excessive by medieval standards. Morris stresses that he faced an experienced, aggressive French king and ruled an England exhausted by expensive wars and tired of fighting in France. Like other medieval historians, the author must rely on surviving archives and contemporary chroniclers aiming to celebrate powerful men and revile their enemies.
The result is a traditional politics-and-war biography: a relentless succession of intrigues, quarrels, battles, sieges, negotiations, truces, and betrayals illuminated by lucid writing but muddied by Morris’ decision to jump back and forth in chronology.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-60598-885-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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 2025 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.
