by David G. Weaver ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 17, 2013
A unique journey back to America’s Southern colonial roots that will appeal to history buffs.
An engaging, informative exploration of the lesser-known battles of the American Revolution, presented through the interactions among fictional and historical characters.
The American Revolutionary War comes to life in Weaver’s (Nav Cad, 2012, etc.) vivid historical novel. Set in South Carolina, the volume is so chock-full of details of life in Charles Town and its surrounding countryside that readers can almost feel themselves walking down the streets or through the swamps. Weaver’s narrative focuses on the scores of usually overlooked Southern skirmishes that kept the British busy and frustrated, making it impossible for them to execute a successful sweeping march to round up the South and then push forward to finish off the North. The fictional hero of the story is Truly Doran, aka Gray Cloud, son of a Catawba maiden, Singing Water, and her white husband, Sean Doran. As a result of his parentage, Truly is considered a “brassankle,” a term derived from the brass ankle shackles that Southerners sometimes used to keep mixed heritage workers from running away. Gray Cloud grows up in his mother’s Catawba village, learning hunting, tracking and survival skills from his uncle, while his father serves as a guide for a government survey project. When Gray Cloud reaches his teenage years, Sean brings him to a prestigious English school in Charles Town, where he goes by his English name, Truly Doran. During these years, he is befriended by Capt. Francis Marion of the 2nd Continental Regiment on Sullivan’s Island and eventually becomes Marion’s scout. Weaver intersperses moments of levity and romance with intricate battle details, giving readers a front-row seat to the personal development of Truly and the emergence of the new America. The linguistic style is just formal enough to simulate 18th-century Southern society, although the use of heavy dialect for three characters (one Irishman and two black slaves) is unnecessarily disruptive, especially since the work does not similarly encumber any other characters (including the two Catawba orphans Truly takes under his wing).
A unique journey back to America’s Southern colonial roots that will appeal to history buffs.Pub Date: May 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-1481750257
Page Count: 388
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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