In the year of her 70th birthday, Elizabeth II of England comes under scrutiny as mother (not quite good enough), wife (better), and constitutional monarch (outstanding). Bradford's work falls into the category of molecular biography—pages of minutiae that very nearly bury the subject and leave the reader gasping for less. But apparently people can't get enough of the British Royals. Bradford (Splendours and Miseries: A Life of Sacheverell Sitwell, 1993, etc.), herself a viscountess, tells all, scandals included. The scandals range from the rumored involvement of Elizabeth's great-great- grandmother Queen Victoria with her servant John Brown to Elizabeth's youngest son's alleged affair with his valet. Detailed looks at the Duke of Windsor's abdication and the family bitterness it caused, Prince Philip's flings (no names, but titles—``a princess, a duchess, two or perhaps three countesses''—and more), and Princess Margaret's ``guttersnipe life'' are titillating and sometimes shocking to casual followers of the Windsor clan. Also scrutinized are the royal finances and the annual peregrinations to family holdings at Sandringham, Balmoral, and Windsor, as well as the fitting and refittings of the royal yacht Britannia, and the queen's fondness for racehorses and corgis. If it was Elizabeth's loose hand on the reins of her family that has contributed to the monarchy being blemished, it may be her dignity and commitment to her nation that saves it. Well informed and professional when she meets with her prime ministers {most of whom have ``fallen in love'' with her, according to Bradford), she works hard and successfully at her role as head of state, a model of ``courage, decency and a sense of duty'' through a period of tumultuous political and social change. No tabloid hype here, but this authoritative biography has enough revealing nuggets scattered through an otherwise flat narrative to keep a royal watcher enthralled. (17 color and 39 b&w photos) (Author tour)
Pub Date: April 16, 1996
ISBN: 0-374-14749-3
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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 Yorkerstaff 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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