An erudite work that presents a fresh facet to Elizabeth’s reign.
An intriguing look at England’s contact with the Ottoman Empire and its enormous influence on Elizabethan commerce and culture, especially the theater.
Brotton (Renaissance Studies/Queen Mary Univ. of London; A History of the World in 12 Maps, 2013, etc.) explores the fascination of Britain with the Islamic world before Queen Elizabeth first wrote to the young sultan, Murad, in 1579, in response to his granting of commercial privileges to the English merchant William Harborne. During the reign of her father, the English world was crazy about commodities from the Islamic world, such as sugar and indigo as well as rich silks and textiles. Yet over the next 17 years of Elizabeth’s reign, the commercial and cultural contact intensified, especially as the Protestant queen, excommunicated by the pope in 1570, used the exchange to wily purpose in countering the Catholic opposition to her reign, especially from Spain, against which the Moroccan sultan Ahmad al-Mansur proposed a military alliance in 1600. The Catholic world excoriated Elizabeth for her alliance with the Turkish “heathens” (as did plenty of internal critics), yet she was clever in the keeping of peace and prosperity considering Ottoman Turkey was a world military power and England a fairly insignificant player on the stage. Brotton looks into the early English travelers to that fabled land of the Mahometans or Moors (the term Muslim was not yet being used)—e.g., the young merchant Anthony Jenkinson, who became head of the new Muscovy Company and traveled to meet and charm the Moorish leaders; Harborne, the “apt man in Constantinople” who navigated the Anglo-Ottoman Capitulations of 1580; and the vainglorious Sir Anthony Sherley, who gained a mention in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. In several chapters Brotton explores the Elizabethan theater’s fairly stereotyped representations of the Moors, culminating in Shakespeare’s fully fleshed, sympathetic Othello.
An erudite work that presents a fresh facet to Elizabeth’s reign.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-525-42882-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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 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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