A good history of difficult times in England and Ireland, but Hutchinson provides little significant information about the...
The story of “one of those mysterious and charismatic characters in British history whose breathtaking exploits underline the wisdom of the old maxim that truth can be stranger than fiction.”
In what is ostensibly a biography of Thomas Blood (1618-1680), the daring fighter, spy, turncoat, and adventurer, Hutchinson (The Spanish Armada, 2014, etc.) glosses over many of his subject’s feats, writing mostly of changing politics during the English civil war and the restoration of Charles II. Blood fought for Charles I in the civil war and switched sides after the king’s execution, an act that netted him vast lands in Ireland. He was part of an abortive rebellion in Ireland after the restoration, and revenge—especially against the Duke of Ormond, lord lieutenant of Ireland—drove him on. He was leader of a group who kidnapped Ormond in London with a view to hanging him, but Ormond escaped. That act brings in two more shady characters, the Duke of Buckingham and Barbara Palmer, Charles II’s mistress. Both were sworn enemies of Ormond, and it seems likely to Hutchinson that they may have instigated the attack. After Blood attempted to steal the crown jewels from the Tower of London, he met with the king, who not only pardoned him, but also granted him a pension, removed the writ of attainder, and paid him a salary for his “services,” which included spying against nonconformists. Blood was a serial turncoat with a number of disguises, even posing as a doctor, but he was no petty thief; he only wished to regain his lands. Readers hoping to discover an Errol Flynn–type swashbuckler will be disappointed; Blood does not come across as the rip-roaring, lovable rogue one might anticipate.
A good history of difficult times in England and Ireland, but Hutchinson provides little significant information about the spy.Pub Date: June 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-68177-144-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
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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