For those who prefer to wade in history’s shallows rather than swim in its depths. (Illustrations throughout)
An aristocratic author who claims descent from both women chronicles the decades-long battle for the attention and love of the France’s Henri II between his queen, Catherine de’ Medici, and his lover, Diane de Poitiers.
Princess Michael of Kent seems most charmed with the beautiful, ageless Diane (1499–1566) and almost grudgingly grants pages to the point of view of Catherine (1519–89), whom she describes as short, dark, bitter, and overmatched. Catherine once ordered holes drilled into her floor so she could observe in the room below the lovemaking of Henri and Diane. As the jealous queen watched, writes the author, “a knife must have pierced fat little Catherine’s heart.” Her children with Henri are not described more flatteringly: one had a “bulbous nose,” another a “ratlike little face,” yet another was “misshapen.” This superficial summary of the 16th century tells much about clothing and gardens, jewelry and architecture, ceremonies and pageants, faces and fashions. Princess Michael praises fine faces and firm bodies, suggesting that women today might benefit from sleek Diane’s beauty regimen. (Those who have her income could especially benefit, one would think.) The author begins with the marriage of 14-year-old Catherine to 14-year-old Henri, who at the time was not directly in line for the throne. (Convenient deaths subsequently made him king.) It ends with the monarch’s death, Catherine’s revenge (she promptly banished Diane from court), and Diane’s subsequent death at age 66. Among the loving, uncritical descriptions of royal excess in Renaissance France are some stories about the ongoing wars with Charles V, the French obsession with Italy and alliances with the Turks, the rivalry between Henri’s father François I and England’s Henry VIII, the burning of heretics, and Henri’s death after receiving a grotesque head wound in a tournament.
For those who prefer to wade in history’s shallows rather than swim in its depths. (Illustrations throughout)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-5104-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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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