Well-balanced, nicely grounded in research and far weightier than the usual royal fluff.
British journalist and historian Gristwood (Arabella: England’s Lost Queen,, 2005, etc.) plunges with admirable clarity into the romantic Tudor arena.
The author restricts her focus to the 30-year relationship between Elizabeth I and Robert Dudley, the queen’s closest adviser, friend and suitor. She rarely deviates to give a larger sense of Elizabeth’s political intentions, and then only to delineate complicated genealogy. The story of these courtly lovers holds endless fascination for moderns, who can’t imagine they didn’t sleep together; yet, by Gristwood’s meticulous examination of the evidence, they almost surely did not. Their sense of united destiny was sealed early in the reign of Elizabeth’s sister Mary when both were thrown in the Tower and threatened with beheading. Upon ascending to the throne in 1558, Elizabeth immediately named Robert her Master of Horse, which meant he was in charge of planning her spectacularly popular “progresses” around the country. (It also ensured that they could ride out together daily.) In 1564, she made him first Earl of Leicester. He was an invaluable pawn in Elizabeth’s marriage brokering over the decades, both as a possible husband and as a foil to the unwelcome attention of others. Gristwood spends a goodly bit of time on the suspicious death of his first wife, who fell down the stairs during the period of intensive speculation about his romance with the queen. The scandal kept Elizabeth from marrying Leicester, though she continued to keep him close to her with “savage possessiveness.” He wed others secretly, yet he stood with her in triumph before the English fleet at Tilbury in 1588, the year of his death. “Holding Elizabeth’s hand was always the best, the real way that he could help his country,” Gristwood remarks tenderly of this devoted subject.
Well-balanced, nicely grounded in research and far weightier than the usual royal fluff.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-670-01828-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
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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