A scholarly and entertaining history of warring brothers.
When brothers got medieval on each other.
Historians Gabriele and Perry did so well with The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe that they have followed it with a narrower focus on the ninth century. Perhaps the best-known figure of that era is Charlemagne (reigned 768-814), who assembled much of Europe into the largest empire since Rome’s and had himself crowned by the pope in 800. Charlemagne ruled alone, mostly, because his brother died three years after the pair took the throne. This followed family tradition that gave every ruler’s son power even while he reigned and divided the kingdom after his death. Charlemagne’s successor, Louis the Pious (ruled 1814-1840), took the throne as the only surviving son, but he already had three adult sons, and a fourth was soon born. This guaranteed trouble. Louis gave his three sons kingly authority over three parts of the empire, but they complained, quarreled, and occasionally took up arms. Matters did not improve when his fourth son reached maturity and received a share of the empire deducted from the others. During much of Louis’ reign, the empire verged on civil war; at one point, he was deposed. Months after his death, the brothers fought the bloody battle of Fontenoy, which solved nothing, soon followed by the 843 Treaty of Verdun, laying out the bounds of each brother’s kingdom. A dead letter from the start, it led to more quarrels and treaties that carried on into following centuries, gradually resolving into what later historians maintain was France and Germany. Lively writers, the authors cast a critical eye on the surviving sources, delivering a painless education on how historians try to determine what actually happened from fragmentary and wildly biased accounts.
A scholarly and entertaining history of warring brothers.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780063336674
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
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
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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