An energetically readable history of a Canadian regiment’s working vacation.
Kapches relates a notable event in the history of the longest-serving regiment in the Canadian Army in this nonfiction debut.
The Queen’s Own Rifles, active since 1860, celebrated its 50th anniversary in 1910, not only with the usual parades, but also with a special junket in which 600 reservists were sent to England to train for a few weeks with the British Army, accompanied by a press contingent to publicize the whole thing. The QOR, as they were known, participated in military exercises and war games, were presented to the king himself, and, in their off time, enjoyed what London had to offer: “London was a large, exciting city and appetites of all sorts could be explored with anonymity and probably were.” Kapches is the daughter of J.N.M. Brown, one of the original press reporters, and in these pages, she does groundbreaking research to flesh out all the details of this moment in the QOR’s history. The main character of the story, as told here, is the regiment’s commanding officer (and the trip’s sponsor), Sir Henry Pellatt. It was a year of change for the English monarchy in 1910, with King Edward VII dying in May and King George V succeeding him, and in these chapters Kapches includes not only all these broader atmospheric details, but also many archival photographs from the press coverage of the day. The result is a priceless work of micro-reporting that’s also an involving reading experience. Kapches is skilled at teasing the nuances of personalities out of yellowed old newspaper columns, particularly in the case of Sir Henry, who comes across in this telling as a fascinating blend of touchy and pompous (“We are not undertaking this trip to England as a mere picnic,” he testily tells a Toronto newspaper at one point). In 1939, Sir Henry commented that “far too much tribute has been said about that 1910 trip,” but those echoes have long since faded. Kapches does a wonderful service in reviving the story so entertainingly.
An energetically readable history of a Canadian regiment’s working vacation.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9781038310583
Page Count: 252
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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