A solid, uniquely focused study of the irresistible Tudors.
Love and diplomacy in Tudor England.
Five Tudor monarchs ruled England from 1485 until 1603. Like most rulers of the era, they chose consorts as a matter of international diplomacy and national stability—i.e., to produce an heir. Genuine love rarely played a role, but this hasn’t prevented a steady stream of authors from writing books about Tudor spouses or about Elizabeth’s stubborn refusal to choose one. British journalist and historian Gristwood, author of Game of Queens: The Women Who Made Sixteenth-Century Europe and other books, has produced another, but with a significant variation. Without ignoring the lives of these consorts and candidates and Renaissance European politics, the author emphasizes that, among the upper classes, courtship aimed to follow the medieval code of courtly love. Arthurian legends of knightly chivalry and passionate, more or less chaste, romance experienced a revival in the 15th century. Bloody tournaments flourished throughout Europe, and royal courtships featured prolix exchanges of picturesque rhetoric. Gristwood begins with a literary history of the Camelot legend. This traditionally dates from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 12th-century narrative of Arthur’s life but includes generous contributions from Dante, Chaucer, Malory, and Tennyson. This book includes more literary scholarship than the average history buff expects, and most readers will be relieved when, around Page 80, Gristwood reaches the late 15th century and begins an appealing account of the Tudor years. The author covers politics, war, and religion but also emphasizes royal matrimony as well as the obligatory mistresses and purported affairs. Except perhaps in the case of Anne Boleyn, passion was absent in the often interminable negotiations for a royal consort, but there was no shortage of oratory, correspondence, and poetry extolling the glories and painful sacrifices of courtly love. Inevitably, most involve Henry VIII’s dogged search for a wife to produce a male heir, but readers may wince at the flowery exchanges between royal suitors and the increasingly elderly and unavailable Elizabeth.
A solid, uniquely focused study of the irresistible Tudors.Pub Date: Dec. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27142-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
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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