Miklosik, a retired anesthesiologist, self-confessed “curmudgeon” and proud contrarian, claims that being born in Canada to...
An armchair historian challenges commonly held views about the American Civil War in a series of incendiary essays.
Miklosik, a retired anesthesiologist, self-confessed “curmudgeon” and proud contrarian, claims that being born in Canada to Slovak immigrants makes him an “impartial observer” to what he sees as the “kiss-ass” canonization of “Saint Abraham Lincoln.” He admits the man spoke well but places him alongside Genghis Khan and Pol Pot in the pantheon of the “world’s cruelest dictators.” He quotes Thomas Paine and John Locke and wonders if Lincoln ever read their work. To Miklosik, “it is mind-boggling” that more than a million “civilized, advanced young men” were sacrificed “just to free from bondage 4,000,000 illiterate, backward savages” because our sixteenth president lacked “patience.” Miklosik considers slavery an “odious industry” but justifies its history by quoting the Old Testament, where “at worst,” it was seen as an “event of minor reprehensibility.” God clearly proscribed, “Thou shall not kill,” but he said nothing about owning slaves. Miklosik claims abolitionists (under the sway of hypocritical Quakers) elevated it into an “abomination”—and an excuse for Northern aggression. To this, the author adds the usual arguments concerning states’ rights, misguided government and the corruption of absolute power. He portrays the South as “agrarian, aristocratic” and the North as “capitalistic, industrial.” This tendency to generalize upends many of the author’s arguments. While he bemoans the bias of “sycophantic” historians, his “jaundiced and cynical views of history” force him into his own dogmatic corner. It might be easy to dismiss a writer who thinks Uncle Tom’s Cabin beats any “propaganda” Goebbels created for Hitler. But no one will deny the man his passion. What the author calls “iconoclastic,” many readers might find over-the-top and offensive.Pub Date: May 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-1469156415
Page Count: 302
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 Yorkerstaff 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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