A welcome refreshment of a seminal era in the forging of the English identity.
A comprehensive overview of the Anglo-Saxon era seeking “to see these people as they were…and try to shed the misconceptions about them that have developed in later centuries.”
Morris, author of The Norman Conquest, King John, William I, and other books of British history, returns with another compelling, sweeping story of old England, starting with the crumbling of the Roman administrative and military edifice in the mid-fifth century. The incursions by the Saxons, Picts, Scots, Jutes, and Angles, among others, wore down the Romanized Britons, and conversion to Christianity followed. Morris meticulously delineates the rise of the Northumbrian kingdom in the north and Mercia in the south, where the great King Offa reigned, and then moves on to the Vikings. Beginning with the raid of Lindisfarne in 793, the Vikings ushered in a long era of marauding armies from the north, taking advantage of the enormous economic growth of the systems of trade further south. “The Scandinavians knew all about the rich coastal communities of the kingdoms to the south,” writes Morris, “and they also knew that they were undefended.” It wasn’t until the late ninth century, with the rise of Alfred the Great of Wessex, that the Norsemen were quelled, leading to the conversion of their leader, Guthrum, and consolidation of Anglo-Saxon fortification across the country’s boroughs and restoration of London in 886. “Alfred, in his determined efforts to undo the cultural destruction that decades of [V]iking attacks had caused,” writes Morris, “was also responsible for a remarkable renaissance in learning, and the elevation of English to a language of literature.” In this rich history, which draws on up-to-date archaeological data, the author also examines significant cultural and intellectual currents and the resurrection of monasticism in the 10th century. He concludes with the doomed King Harold II, whose death at the Battle of Hastings ended Anglo-Saxon rule in England.
A welcome refreshment of a seminal era in the forging of the English identity.Pub Date: May 25, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64313-312-6
Page Count: 452
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
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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