The run-up to the French Revolution in expert hands.
A page-turner on the 40 years before the fall of the Bastille.
The kings during this period were Louis XV and his grandson, Louis XVI, absolute monarchs whose rule was far from absolute, writes veteran historian Darnton, recipient of the National Humanities Medal and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Despite an oppressive police force, Paris citizenry remained touchy, often disrespectful, and sometimes violent. Royal power also faced resistance from the Parlement, which was not a legislative body but an assembly that oversaw the courts and legal system. A law wasn’t official until Parlement published it, and it regularly used this power to express disagreement. Inevitably, wars dominated these decades. Following the War of the Austrian Succession, the Seven Years’ War was a disaster; victory supporting the American colonies seemed satisfying revenge over Britain but swelled an already massive debt. Wars are expensive, and since the church and aristocracy paid no taxes, they weighed heavily on the poor. Throughout this prodigiously researched narrative, Darnton concentrates on scandal and royal infighting, a reasonable tactic because kings preferred to leave the boring details of governing to underlings. The author accomplishes the impressive feat of bringing to vivid life these men, largely unknown to American readers, who were preoccupied with raising money. Reforms to require the church and aristocracy to contribute always failed, but borrowing was easy, so that’s what they did until 1787, when investors refused to subscribe to the latest loan. Declaring “partial bankruptcy,” officials cut interest payments, mostly to annuities that provided income to average citizens. This “produced outrage and panic” that was not relieved with news that the king would summon the Estates General, an ancient advisory body last called in 1614, which would, in theory, establish a constitution, reform the tax system, and regenerate France. It met two years later, and Darnton capably chronicles what followed, but riots and mass murder were already well under way.
The run-up to the French Revolution in expert hands.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781324035589
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
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
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