That aside, Iron Tears does a respectable job of sorting through the causes of the colonial break.
Prolific historian Weintraub (General Washington’s Christmas Farewell, 2003, etc.) turns in a readable survey of the American Revolution, concentrating on political battles more than military ones.
The phrase “iron tears” is Edmund Burke’s. A member of Parliament at the time, Burke worried, Weintraub writes, whether the “inevitable separation” of Britain from its colonies was worth a war that would be fought as much in sadness as in anger. Burke’s peers were less concerned with such things, and when Parliament repealed the Stamp Act in 1766, its members overwhelmingly reasserted that body’s authority to make law and policy for the colonies, much against the wishes of the growing self-rule movement across the water. (Interestingly, Weintraub notes, “one of the tiny band of five peers to vote against the bill . . . in sympathy with colonial grievances was . . . Lord Charles Cornwallis, twenty-seven, and a colonel of the 33rd Foot, who would change his mind when the colonists took to arms.”) Weintraub skillfully guides his readers through the tangled politics of the time, writing of the struggles that surrounded both the revolutionary effort and King George’s campaigns to control his government, particularly as antiwar sentiment grew in London. Along the way, Weintraub explains why it was that George and his commanders resorted early on to the use of mercenary soldiers, so outraging the colonists: The defeated Irish and Scots couldn’t be trusted, and arming proletarian Englishmen posed similar risks. William Pitt correctly predicted the outcome: If foreigners were to occupy his nation, he argued, then, “I would never lay down my arms—never—never—never!” Why, then, would the colonists do otherwise? Weintraub’s accounts of various armed engagements are good but hurried. Readers with an interest in the military history of the Revolution will want to turn to sources such as Robert Middlekauff’s essential The Glorious Cause (1985).
That aside, Iron Tears does a respectable job of sorting through the causes of the colonial break.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2687-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2004
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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