by Jeremy Black ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2009
For specialists only.
Ponderous explication of the complex relationship between Britain and her 13 American colonies.
Black (History/Univ. of Exeter; Great Military Leaders and Their Campaigns, 2008, etc.) examines in minute detail the 18th-century roots of factors that have continued to shape British-U.S. relations for more than two centuries. Writing for scholars and students, he describes the events and machinations of the period, in which European powers Britain, France and Spain pursued expansionist impulses while groups in America, including colonists, Native Americans and African-Americans, sought to protect their interests. Against the background of British America’s growth in the 1600s, Black shows that the colonists often maintained close, friendly relations with Britain based on a shared identity, growing economic integration, cultural and religious links and a pressing need for support in the face of diverse external threats. Too often, he writes, historians have underrated “the extent to which colonists contributed to the development of the Empire” as well as “the Englishness (and from 1707 Britishness) of early America.” For all that, British policies and governance styles soon led to a civil war, aka the American Revolution, that few in the colonies actually wanted. The author’s British perspective and his deliberate effort to view events as if the revolution were not inevitable helps reveal the many complexities of this 18th-century relationship. His relentless examinations of the era’s politicking, diplomacy and warfare, with no pauses to reflect, explain or frame the issues, will prove off-putting to many readers.
For specialists only.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-8472-5243-2
Page Count: 210
Publisher: Continuum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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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BOOK TO SCREEN
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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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