Fans of sturdy, traditional history will appreciate this comprehensive survey.
A dense narrative account of Great Britain’s social and political conflicts in the decades before World War I.
“Swagger was the predominant style of the period,” asserts journalist and popular historian Heffer in his first book to be published in the U.S. He notes that the affluence and complacency of the English upper classes, traditionally viewed as defining features of the late Victorian and Edwardian years, covered up working-class, feminist, and Irish discontents. The Third Reform Act of 1884 went a long way toward extending the franchise, and the House of Lords reluctantly assented to it, but the Lords’ fierce resistance to the “People’s Budget” of 1909 provoked a constitutional crisis that nearly resulted in the abolition of the aristocratic upper chamber. Heffer covers this struggle as well as the parliamentary battles over Irish home rule and the government’s maladroit handling of such colonial imbroglios as the Boer War and the Siege of Khartoum. The author’s level of detail will daunt casual readers, but those who like their history long and leisurely will enjoy his approach. He offers similarly in-depth treatments of various juicy scandals among the Marlborough House Set, the louche circle formed around the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII), and he shows how they were examples of the triviality and sexual hypocrisy of Britain’s upper classes. Queen Victoria fares no better, sketched as a dour reactionary who detested the liberal governments she was forced to collaborate with as a constitutional monarch. Heffer comes across as middle-of-the-road politically and socially: He deplores Britain’s economic inequality and imperial injustices, but he depicts the strikes of trade union activists and the protests of militant suffragettes as provocative and needlessly divisive. Judicious but brief passages about the period’s culture, including exegeses of such paradigmatic works as John Galsworthy’s play Strife and H.G Wells’ novel Ann Veronica, somewhat leaven the heavy overall focus on political maneuvers.
Fans of sturdy, traditional history will appreciate this comprehensive survey.Pub Date: April 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64313-670-7
Page Count: 912
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
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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