Dense at times, but conducted with brio.
The magnificent Benedictine Durham Priory is the protagonist of this latest from historian Moorhouse (Great Harry’s Navy: How Henry VIII Gave England Seapower, 2006, etc.).
The priory serves as a focal point for the author’s elegiac history recounting King Henry VIII’s dissolution of England’s Catholic monasteries. After his break with Rome over the pope’s refusal to countenance his second marriage, the king took over the English church and disbanded hundreds of monastic communities in the 1530s and ’40s. The monks could remain in the religious life, if they accepted Henry’s spiritual leadership, or enter secular society. The dissolution was tremendously disruptive to English society. Monasteries like Durham had been vital centers of their communities, providing jobs, rental housing and crucial supply to, as well as demand for, local food markets. All those services, as well as charitable aid to the poor, were lost when Henry’s henchmen destroyed a monastery—and they destroyed quite a few. Durham survived—it’s the Anglican Durham Cathedral today—and Moorhouse revels in descriptions of its architectural splendor and the monks’ routine. His ladling of details is occasionally excessive, but the author’s gusto for his topic resonates like a Gregorian chant, and he draws his villains in all their outsized venality. Henry was a tyrant who practiced several of the deadly sins, including lust and greed. He hijacked the monasteries for their loot as much as for religious motives, needing to replenish an exchequer drained by his profligacy. Those who refused to cooperate with his makeover of the nation’s spiritual structure went to their deaths. The overseers of Durham capitulated, thus sparing from destruction a breathtaking monument to a past world. Moorhouse celebrates their acquiescence, if not their timidity.
Dense at times, but conducted with brio.Pub Date: April 30, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-9333461-8-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: BlueBridge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2009
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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