A great choice for any history buff.
A well-documented study of several significant women of the medieval era.
Using archaeological discoveries and the objects and literature connected to these women, Ramirez, a BBC presenter and Oxford lecturer, seeks to comprehend their spheres of influence and expand their stories. Queens and abbesses, tradeswomen and artisans, monastics and mystics: The author demonstrates to a modern audience that, contrary to many traditional historical accounts, women in the Middle Ages had power, influence, and agency. “This book has focused on a handful of women who highlight specific themes—diplomacy, artistic production, warfare, literacy and leadership—at particular moments throughout the medieval period,” she writes. “Every woman is a complex web of characteristics….It wasn’t just rich and powerful men who built the modern world. Women have always been a part of it, as has the full range of human diversity, but we are only now beginning to see what has been hidden in plain sight.” Ramirez presents an impressive array of evidence, including art, jewelry, coinage, needlework, and manuscripts. She begins each chapter with a “discovery,” which run the gamut from the minuscule (discerning a new figure for King Harold on the Bayeux Tapestry) to the dramatic (stealing the “priceless” Riesencodex, by Hildegard of Bingen, from the Soviets in the aftermath of World War II). Among other interesting characters, the author introduces us to Jadwiga, crowned “king” of Poland in 1384 and now a Roman Catholic saint; and an unknown woman of African origin who was found in a Black Plague mass burial ground and whose bones, like others found nearby, “show evidence of health issues caused by living in a densely populated urban environment.” Ramirez also highlights new breakthroughs in archaeology and anthropological study that have allowed researchers to uncover these hidden stories. Extensive, well-researched, and readable, this book invites us to reassess the historical record.
A great choice for any history buff.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2023
ISBN: 9781335498526
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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 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
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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