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INNOVATION

THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND VOLUME VI

Thorough, readable history by a seasoned researcher and author.

In the final installment of his History of England series, the veteran historian tackles the erosion of the British Empire and the modernization of the national economy.

Like the preceding five titles, Ackroyd’s latest is a wide-ranging, elegant work of scholarship covering a century of British history, politics, and culture, from the death of Queen Victoria in 1901 to 2000. During this time period, the old aristocracy contracted as egalitarianism expanded. The Edwardian era, writes the author, saw a “cultural divide in England between those who wanted to shore up the Victorian establishment and those who hoped to build a more egalitarian country from its ruins.” Some of the currents the author follows include the continued decline of the aristocratic class, the growth of the middle class, the mass migrations into cities while grand estates were sold to “new men,” travel’s transitioning from horse to bicycle and motorcar, and the burgeoning understanding that poverty was largely caused by social ills rather than as a result of immorality. Great leaders from Lloyd George to Winston Churchill grasped this new period of political history, in which the “condition of the people” was at the forefront of reform efforts. Along with a minute delineation of political machinations, Ackroyd chronicles the surge of women moving into public roles as suffragists turned more militant; the insoluble debate over Irish Home Rule; and the nationalist sentiments that precipitated the march to war with Germany. Though numerous other authors have covered the war years better, Ackroyd is at his finest weaving together the cultural fabric of the nation, describing the “hungry thirties,” the establishment of the postwar welfare state during an austere time, Britain’s uneasy rapport with Europe, and the triumph of British icons such as Twiggy, Margaret Thatcher, Princess Diana, and Harry Potter.

Thorough, readable history by a seasoned researcher and author.

Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-250-00366-9

Page Count: 512

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: July 26, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Awards & Accolades

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  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2017


  • New York Times Bestseller


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  • National Book Award Finalist

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

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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

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