Well-written but mixed collection: some substantial contributions, others self-indulgent.
Historians examine events they wish they could have experienced firsthand.
“What is the scene or incident in American history that you would like to have witnessed—and why?” editor Hollinshead asks his distinguished contributors. The answers run the gamut, from a 1783 plot against George Washington by his own officers to the conversation that took place between Lyndon Johnson and Alabama governor George Wallace around the time of Martin Luther King Jr.’s attempted march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. Half of the 20 essays cover events that preceded the Civil War, such as the Salem witchcraft trials and the Amistad case, while the other half focus on more modern events, including Chief Joseph’s 1877 surrender to the Seventh Cavalry and an imagined conversation between John and Robert Kennedy on the subject of Vietnam. Exemplary pieces—by Joseph Ellis, on George Washington’s 1790 meeting with 27 chiefs of the Creek Nation; Jonathan Rabb, on the Scopes trial; and Clayborne Carson, on the March on Washington—effectively mix factual accounts with conjecture about unrecorded events. Others have the feel of a school history assignment, and a few explore events that, while significant, hardly “changed America.” Pieces about an 11th-century trip to the pre-Columbian city of Cahokia and the 1850 American debut of world-renowned soprano Jenny Lind lack dramatic impact.
Well-written but mixed collection: some substantial contributions, others self-indulgent.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2006
ISBN: 0-385-51619-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2006
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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