A disturbing reconsideration of a key period of history and a powerful indictment of its main actors.
In this history of the four decades preceding the Civil War, Langguth (Union 1812: The Americans Who Fought the Second War of Independence, 2006, etc.) argues that Andrew Jackson’s handling of the Cherokees sowed the seeds of secession.
The author organizes the narrative around a series of individual portraits, one per chapter. Some are well-known, including presidents, generals or senators such as Clay and Calhoun. Others, including Cherokee leaders Major Ridge and John Ross, will be new names to most readers. The author focuses mostly on the Cherokees, whose expulsion from Georgia has gone down in infamy as the Trail of Tears, one of the greatest blots on American history. The Cherokees were one of the “Five Civilized Tribes,” many of whom had adopted an agricultural, settled lifestyle in many ways identical to their white neighbors, right down to the use of slaves to work their fields. It was their misfortune to occupy territory coveted by white plantation owners, the prime cotton-growing lands of the Deep South. They believed Jackson, whose allies they had been during his campaigns against the British, to be their protector. But Jackson was playing a more complex game, in which sectional disputes and party politics threatened to tear apart the young nation while the likes of Clay and Adams tried to hold it together. Southerners, suspicious of any limitation on slavery, opposed Jackson’s policies with threats to secede and with the doctrine of nullification, giving states the right to void federal laws they disliked. Supporting the Georgians in their desire to expel the Cherokees, Jackson allowed the South to expand and strengthen its main asset, agricultural wealth. Langguth puts the backroom deals, Washington gossip and tribal politics into the larger context of the expulsion of the Cherokees from their homeland. By giving in to the Georgians, writes the author, Jackson made the Civil War inevitable. The final chapters, leading up to the eve of the war, are somewhat rushed compared to the full treatment of the events of the 1830s and ’40s.
A disturbing reconsideration of a key period of history and a powerful indictment of its main actors.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4859-1
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2010
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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