An evenhanded biography of an unlovable figure of Civil War history.
A proficient study of a diehard Confederate cavalry general.
Historian Arthur (Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair, 2006) doesn’t disguise his ambivalence toward this hotheaded opportunist who threw his lot into the losing side and gained little, save a reputation as a ferocious fighting man, “the embodiment of certain enduring American characteristics and values.” Raised in Kentucky and “groomed as a merchant prince,” Joseph Orville Shelby (1830–1897) was offered the chance to serve for the Union after hostilities broke out in 1861. His good friend and fellow Missourian Frank Blair, a Republican congressman, offered him a commission, but Shelby fervently supported states’ rights in the bloody aftermath of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, and had been involved in nasty cross-border raids. Indeed, he was already funneling munitions to the Confederates and was soon put in charge of defending the Trans-Mississippi Department, the 400,000 square miles that lay west of the Mississippi. While the federal forces recognized the significance of controlling the river, the Confederacy used the area as a “salvage yard” for dumping “malcontents and incompetents.” Shelby’s Iron Brigade was effective at the quick attack-and-retreat style in the face of the Union’s superior numbers, establishing Shelby’s reputation as fierce and reckless. Refusing to acknowledge Southern surrender, he forayed into Mexico in June 1865 with a band of about 300 “hard cases on the prowl and bristling with weapons,” looking to incite the Mexicans under Benito Juárez against the Union, then switched sides and offered their services to Maximilian and the French invaders, who rejected them. Arthur fashions a dignified portrait of this troublesome character and knowledgeably delves into a little-studied period of post–Civil War machinations with Mexico.
An evenhanded biography of an unlovable figure of Civil War history.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6830-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010
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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