An expert, extremely detailed account of John Adams’ finest hour.
The first shots in the American Revolution occurred during the Boston Massacre, and this history describes the trial that followed, certainly “the most important case in American colonial history.”
On March 5, 1770, British soldiers, harassed by a mob throwing snowballs and rocks, fired into the crowd, killing five and injuring six. Abrams, the chief legal affairs correspondent for ABC News, and prolific author Fisher (co-authors: Lincoln's Last Trial: The Murder Case That Propelled Him to the Presidency, 2018) write that the 34-year-old Adams, a successful lawyer who was sympathetic to the protestors, agreed to defend the officer and eight soldiers accused of murder. He would later write, “Counsel ought to be the very last thing an accused person should want in a free country….” This was a moderately courageous act that did his growing law practice no good. To his dying day, Adams grumbled that opponents used the trial to impugn his patriotism. This may have been true, but since then, historians have given him high marks. There were two trials. In the first, the defense had little trouble convincing the jury that Thomas Preston, the officer in charge, did not order his men to fire. In the second, Adams and colleagues strived to show that the soldiers feared for their lives, thus giving them the right to kill in self-defense. They largely succeeded. The jury exonerated six and convicted two of the lesser charge of manslaughter. The letter “m” was burned onto their thumbs as punishment. A transcript exists of the soldiers’ trial, which is perhaps too much of a good thing, as the authors quote liberally from it. Despite variations, readers will encounter perhaps 100 pages of witnesses’ descriptions of the same event followed by several lawyers’ careful reviews of those that support the case. Many readers will feel the urge to skim these parts, but on the whole, the narrative is engaging.
An expert, extremely detailed account of John Adams’ finest hour.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-335-01592-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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