Probably the definitive British naval history, exhaustive but with a wide appeal.
The author of the two earlier doorstops in this trilogy delivers a finale that will not disappoint.
Illness and surgery delayed Rodger, professor of naval history at the University of Exeter, after volume 2 in 2004, but after this tome’s first chapter, a masterful overview of Britain and the world after Napoleon’s fall, readers may regret that only 600 pages remain. Like every great power, including the U.S. today, patriotic Britons had no doubt that they were the master race and deserved the world’s respect. In fact, Britain enjoyed an impressive run. Rodger has no quarrel with the historical cliché that the Royal Navy ruled the seas in the century after 1815, enforcing peace while protecting a burgeoning trade and frantically adapting to technological advances (steam, breech-loading canons, screw propellers, ironclads, oil, submarines), social changes (peacetime flogging wasn’t stopped until 1879), and leadership; Rodger delivers vivid, often revisionist opinions of significant figures that do not exclude immortals from Wellington to Gladstone to Churchill. Readers may especially perk up at the book’s halfway point during the run-up to World War II, when American naval power arrived permanently on the scene. Rodger’s gripping account of World War II from the British point of view reveals that America’s takeover of world leadership was not entirely magnanimous. Some American leaders had long disliked Britain; many American policies empowered America at Britain’s expense, and some led to the U.K.’s postwar financial crisis. The book is dense with technical details, naval tactics, accounts of sailors and leading figures, weapons development, and often cutthroat political and strategic infighting. Despite this, navy buffs will have to share their pleasure with a general readership because Rodger regularly steps back to recount two centuries of world history, emphasizing the strategy, technology, and actions of rival powers.
Probably the definitive British naval history, exhaustive but with a wide appeal.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780393292220
Page Count: 976
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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 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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