In this scholarly, limpidly written work, Rubin (The Mother Mirror, 1984; The New Suburban Woman, 1982) recounts the story of Spain's greatest queen and the impact of her reign on her country and the world. The marriage of Isabella of Castile and Prince Ferdinand of Aragon (1469), more than any other event, caused the creation of the Spanish state by merging Spain's two main Christian kingdoms. Rubin demonstrates that Isabella's unique personality left a pervasive mark on the nascent Spanish society. Isabella's devout Catholicism led her to embrace religious fanatics like her confessor Cisneros, and resulted in the completion of the reconquista (the conquest of Moorish Spain), the expulsion of the Jews and Moors from Spain, and the institution of the uniquely repressive and cruel Spanish Inquisition (Rubin speculates, without much evidence, that Isabella suffered from a troubled conscience about these excesses). The author also shows how Isabella's faith motivated her to support Columbus's voyages of discovery (she saw his explorations principally as an opportunity to win new souls to Christ, and Rubin relies on primary sources to illustrate Isabella's misgivings at Columbus's frank exploitation of the natives). Rubin also explains the relationship between Isabella's personal tragedies and European politics—the marriage of her daughters Catherine and Juana had important historic consequences but both ended in tragedy. While the author demonstrates the critical importance of Isabella's reign for the Spain that emerged from it, she does not succeed in making a case for Isabella as a ``Renaissance queen'': Isabella united and strengthened Spain but left it intellectually hobbled and dominated by the Church, and less culturally diverse and tolerant than before. Nonetheless, Rubin succeeds admirably in recounting the accomplishments of one of European history's greatest monarchs. A first-rate exposition.
Pub Date: Oct. 24, 1991
ISBN: 0-312-05878-0
Page Count: 496
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1991
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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