Schama (History/Harvard), author of Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands 1780-1813 and The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, offers an epic new history of the French Revolution in honor of this year's bicentenary. Utilizing day-to-day accounts of people ordinary and not so ordinary, presenting them in the highly accessible manner of traditional narrative, Schama synthesizes many theories that have populated the historical writings about this era. Thematically, his most important contribution is in revealing French culture and society in the reign of Louis XVI to have been "troubled more by its addiction to change than resistance to it." Similarly, he contends that "much of the anger that fired revolutionary violence arose from the hostility towards modernization, rather than impatience with the speed of its progress." Thus, the "new class" that arose against the monarchy turns out to have been not new at all—but rather doctors, lawyers, noblemen, priests, and other professionals. In the end, Schama appears to have a closer affinity with Tocqueville than has been seen in a century. He chastises the Revolution as having actually been destructive of all the little triumphs of modernization that had been accumulating under the old regime ("Marseille and Lyon only recovered as the Revolution receded. . ."), and all for a cause that produced no great social transformations and which only relieved Frenchmen's extraordinary taxes as their military frontier expanded: "When that frontier suddenly retreated in 1814. . .they were stuck with the bill which, just as in 1789, they refused to pay, sealing the Empire's fate." As for advances of the rural poor, Schama argues that "the Revolution was just an interlude in the inexorable modernisation of property rights that had been well under way before 1789." Indeed, the major legacy of the Revolution, as he sees it, is a negative one: "the invention of a prodigious new kind of warrior state," as well as a ubiquitous violence that forever marked it in blood. In all, a refreshing vision narrated in a passionate style, without sacrifice of detail.
Pub Date: March 31, 1989
ISBN: 0679726101
Page Count: -
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1989
BOOK REVIEW
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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