An ingenious premise delivered in lively, accessible prose backed by impressive research.
Contradicting historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous “frontier thesis,” Linklater (Measuring America, 2002, etc.) claims it was America’s borders that shaped our national character.
Pioneers on the borderless frontier, Turner maintained, hated government control and craved the liberty provided by open, free land. Not so, insists Linklater. True, settlers grabbed free land wherever they could, but what they yearned for above all was legal title to their property. Once they’d acquired their land, each wave of settlers immediately set to work establishing a system to provide law and order and to recognize their claims. From 1783 on, new states rushed to send out surveyors to establish their borders, then mark out sections to record, sell and tax. This was critical, Linklater points out, because land sales provided virtually 100 percent of a state’s revenue. The author reintroduces a major historical character, unknown today but familiar to the founding fathers and early presidents: astronomer and surveyor Andrew Ellicott. Quickly acquiring a reputation for dazzling precision, he spent 40 years roaming the nation, laying out borders that stand to this day and in the process making political decisions that also stand. Ellicott (not Pierre L’Enfant) surveyed the new capital, Washington, and drew the original map that appears in history books. Marking our borders proved to be a surprisingly contentious process. Moving into the 19th century, Linklater reminds us that it was less slavery itself than disputes over its boundaries that inflamed both sides. Campaigning in 1860, Lincoln denied an interest in abolition but stressed keeping slavery within a defined area.
An ingenious premise delivered in lively, accessible prose backed by impressive research.Pub Date: July 4, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8027-1533-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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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