Stories of important men behaving badly usually make entertaining reading, and this is no exception.
An engrossing account of the new American republic’s first great treason trial.
Aaron Burr is remembered today chiefly as the man who killed Alexander Hamilton in an 1804 duel—and that’s hardly the only blot on his escutcheon. Although the reputations of our nation's early leaders have generally fluctuated (John Adams’s is currently rising, Jefferson's declining), Burr's has held steady: It was dismal during most of his life and hasn't budged. Washington detested him. Adams thought him corrupt. Jefferson chose him as running mate, then turned violently against him. Yet he was among the most brilliant men of his time, though he never wrote or spoke on the great issues of the day and seems to have been the only leading figure of the Revolutionary War generation with no political philosophy. Burr had plenty of ambition, however. Hamilton’s death ensured he would have no political future once his term as vice-president was up (in 1805), so he abruptly turned to treason, writing to offer his services to the British government. With money and a few warships, he explained, he could lead a revolt to detach the frontier areas west of the Appalachians from the union. The plot was well advanced and an open secret when Jefferson finally stirred himself to order Burr’s arrest in 1807. The subsequent trial galvanized the nation and showed many of the founding fathers in a surprisingly unpleasant light. Obsessed with convicting Burr, Jefferson peppered the prosecution with advice. The presiding judge was Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall. A bitter enemy of Jefferson, he made many partisan comments, and his rulings favored Burr, who was acquitted. Melton (The First Impeachment, not reviewed; Law/Univ. of North Carolina) is well-qualified to illuminate the thorny legal issues that surrounded Burr's actions, indictment, and trial. He also expresses strong opinions on the behavior of the lawyers involved.
Stories of important men behaving badly usually make entertaining reading, and this is no exception.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-471-39209-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
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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