A thorough look at the dissension that tore the country apart.
A historian examines Abraham Lincoln’s trajectory toward the ending of slavery.
Crofts (History/Coll. of New Jersey; A Secession Crisis Enigma: William Henry Hulbert and “The Diary of a Public Man,” 2010, etc.) complicates the image of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator in this meticulously detailed history of American politics in the years leading up to the Civil War. He argues in particular against hagiographic portrayals in Steven Spielberg’s movie Lincoln, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, and Civil War histories by a host of other scholars. The responsible historian, Crofts writes, “should try to stand apart from both sides in the secession crisis tangle and explain how each misunderstood the other.” He does note several scholars who take this dispassionate view, making his own contribution a reprisal and augmentation rather than a groundbreaking discovery. Crofts underscores two questions that were central to the contention between North and South, Republican and Democrat: did the Constitution protect states’ right to hold slaves, without interference from the federal government? Could the federal government prohibit slavery in newly acquired territories? As the author recounts the positions of a large cast of participants, he notes repeatedly that many Republicans insisted on barring slaves from territories and opposed admitting new slave states but held “that slavery could never be touched by the federal government.” Lincoln reassured the South on that point. In the months after his election, Crofts writes, “the last thing on his mind was the long-run future of slavery in the United States or the many indignities and hardships suffered by American slaves.” Central to the author’s argument is Lincoln’s prewar 13th Amendment, “a constitutional guarantee that slavery should not be molested in any way directly or indirectly in the States.” Four years later, after his hopes of preventing secession failed, Lincoln saw the real 13th Amendment passed, ending slavery and elevating his reputation.
A thorough look at the dissension that tore the country apart.Pub Date: April 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4696-2731-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
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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