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THE BRAVE BOSTONIANS

HUTCHINSON, FRANKLIN, QUINCY, AND THE COMING OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

Shunning caricatures of American revolutionary patriots as heroes and British loyalists as traitors or cowards, novelist McFarland (Seasons of Fear, 1983, etc.) shows in this absorbing narrative of three lives that the prerevolutionary crisis in Boston in 1774—75 had all the complexity and tragedy of a true civil war, and neither side had any monopoly on courage, virtue, or villainy. In the 1770s, Thomas Hutchinson, Benjamin Franklin, and Josiah Quincy seemingly had much in common: All were prominent native Bostonians (although Franklin had spent his adult life in Philadelphia), all were devoted to America, and, at least at the outset, all were committed to the British Empire and its tradition of law, property rights, and individual liberty. Quincy, a fervent and tubercular patriot who died as the crisis turned into outright war, worked for independence from the outset but represented the British soldiers charged in the Boston Massacre and initially deplored the patriot mobs. Hutchinson, Massachusetts’s last royal governor, emerges in McFarland’s account as a moderate and intelligent conservative. But, out of touch with Americans’ national aspirations and convinced that the better course was cooperation with Britain, he was violently driven out of Boston by mobs and watched helplessly from his London exile as the crisis erupted into war. Franklin was a previous advocate of empire whose son was royal governor of New Jersey and who had spent ten years in London as an agent for several of the colonies. He became embroiled in scandal when he stole and clandestinely circulated several letters of Hutchinson’s that showed the royal governor’s callousness toward America. Humiliated before the Privy Council in a speech by the solicitor general and stripped of his perquisites, Franklin was to sever his last ties with Britain and become one of the founders of the United States. A compelling narrative that reads like excellent fiction, but also a reminder of the suffering and moral dilemmas that Americans faced during the American Revolution.

Pub Date: April 1, 1998

ISBN: 0-8133-3440-3

Page Count: 256

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

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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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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