by Edwin Burrows ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 10, 2008
A moving tribute to the martyrs of the prison ships and a cautionary tale for a country, itself now wealthy and powerful,...
A Pulitzer Prize–winning historian revisits the story of the brutal, degrading treatment of American prisoners of war during the Revolution.
According to Burrows (History/Brooklyn Coll.; co-author, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, 1999, etc.), 20th-century historians have underestimated the extent and severity of British mistreatment of American prisoners, wrongly dismissing letters, affidavits, legal documents and other contemporaneous accounts as exaggerated propaganda. The author maintains that of the 35,800 American war-related deaths, roughly half died in New York City, either in the prisons, sugar houses and churches converted for the purpose, or prison ships. Victims of rotten food, foul water, overcrowding and a lack of proper clothing, blankets and firewood, a small number of the captives turned coat, sterling “proof” of their virtue. Moreover, as the war progressed, the unspeakable deaths of so many established a kind of moral Rubicon, making reconciliation with the mother country impossible. Americans accused Britain of purposely erecting a system designed “to murder [the prisoners] by inches, to treat them ten times more cruelly than if they had hung them all the day they took them.” Although 18th-century rules of war were merely theoretical (even the informal code among officers and gentlemen broke down in this peculiar conflict), references to captured Americans as POWs appeared to concede the reality of American independence and legitimize Congress. With the legal status of the prisoners uncertain, British authorities allowed Gen. William Howe and his subordinates a free hand, with disastrous consequences for the prisoners and for British prestige. This horrific tale references such glittering personalities as Washington, Lafayette and Franklin, as well as Ethan Allen and Philip Freneau. Mostly, though, it’s the story of thousands of nameless Americans who gave their lives for liberty.
A moving tribute to the martyrs of the prison ships and a cautionary tale for a country, itself now wealthy and powerful, “at risk of becoming the kind of enemy they laid down their lives to defeat.”Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-465-00835-3
Page Count: 346
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2008
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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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