A skillful traditional history of the American Revolution that pays more than the usual attention to its American opponents.
American loyalists get short shrift in many accounts of the American Revolution. Prolific historian Brands gives them a little more room on the stage.
Brands, chair of the history department at the University of Texas and one of our most reliable chroniclers of popular American history, delivers an expert account narrated heavily through quotes from the writings of Washington, Franklin, and their contemporaries. The author’s use of original documents lends the book a vivid, historically authentic flavor, though some readers may not thrill to pages of 18th-century prose. Almost everyone was loyal during the French and Indian War, when Washington became the Colonies’ best-known military figure and Franklin, already a powerful force in Pennsylvania’s government, led efforts to support British forces. Sent to England to look after Pennsylvania’s affairs, Franklin emerged as the spokesman for American interests in the 1760s. He opposed the 1765 Stamp Act but, still loyal, accepted it when it became law. As a result, his Philadelphia house was nearly destroyed by angry mobs, a fate that befell Thomas Hutchinson, lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. Franklin was as stunned as anyone by the violent reaction, and he worked diligently for repeal and continued, with diminishing success, to support the Colonies, returning to America in 1775, now a firm advocate of independence. Brands delivers a proficient account of the subsequent fighting and peace negotiation, focusing on Washington and Franklin. Regarding the loyalists on the American side, Benedict Arnold’s story is old news; Hutchinson fled to England in 1774; and Joseph Galloway, a friend and colleague of Franklin’s in Pennsylvania politics, served in the First Continental Congress, where he opposed independence, became a leading loyalist, and moved to Britain in 1778. Perhaps the most surprising figure was Franklin’s son, William. Appointed Royal Governor of New Jersey, he remained stubbornly loyal even after his arrest and imprisonment for two years. His father never forgave him.
A skillful traditional history of the American Revolution that pays more than the usual attention to its American opponents.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-385-54651-5
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
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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