Clear and compelling popular history.
Informed account of the role played by the fabulously wealthy Herbert family in the years leading up to the English Civil War.
The family began to accumulate wealth and possessions with William Herbert, whose wife was the sister of Henry VIII’s sixth queen, Katherine Parr. Shortly after Henry confiscated Catholic Church properties in 1539, William was granted stewardship of a magnificent 50,000-acre Wiltshire estate attached to ancient Wilton Abbey. He built a flashy new house on the property in 1543, gained permanent title to the land in 1544 and was named the first earl of Pembroke in 1551. The ship of prosperity sailed merrily on for the Herberts from there, though their relationship with the crown was not always easy. When Henry’s heir, young Edward VI, died in 1553, William initially supported Lady Jane Grey for queen; then, realizing the weakness of her forces, he shifted his allegiance to Mary Tudor, who rewarded his prudence. Travel writer and popular historian Nicolson (God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible, 2003, etc.) describes the early earls as consumed by “the dream of Arcadia” (a theme he follows throughout), profoundly conservative in their land management and cultural tastes. He chronicles the Herberts’ rise in wealth and political influence and assesses their patronage of the arts. “The Onlie Begetter” of one William Shakespeare’s Sonnets, coyly masked as “W. H.” in the dedication to the 1609 edition, is identified by the author as young Will Herbert, grandson of the first earl. Nicolson provides ample cultural context to keep general readers abreast of events. He shows, for example, how the Christian calendar organized the year, and he highlights the ongoing ferocious conflict between Protestants and Catholics. He traces the intricate choreography of the Herberts’ dance with royalty, culminating with the text of the fourth earl’s equivocating 1642 speech to Parliament about his fear of losing all in a civil war.
Clear and compelling popular history.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-115431-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
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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