Reads well enough, but Clary’s account adds little to what is already known about either Washington or Lafayette.
The founding father may never have had children of his own, but he was a father figure to a young man who served him and the country well.
Thus runs former U.S. Forest Service historian Clary’s serviceable account of the great friendship between Virginia plantation owner George Washington and “the very high and very mighty lord Monseigneur Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch-Gilbert du Motier de La Fayette.” Lafayette was descended from a long line of orphans, thanks to his family’s habit of volunteering for war; his own father was killed by a British artilleryman whom Lafayette claimed to have killed in return during the Revolutionary War. Lafayette grew up under the strong tutelage of the classics, which filled him with “glorious obsessions” that events usually conspired to stymie. Just so, Washington, who had made his Virginia militia one of the most effective combat units in the French and Indian War, was often frustrated by British bureaucrats, and he seems to have taken quickly to the teenaged Frenchman who crossed the ocean to volunteer for the revolutionary cause even after the French king had expressly forbidden him to do so. The rest of the Continental leadership, however, “had fallen for the notion that he went to America with the government’s secret approval,” and so Lafayette was welcomed everywhere; Washington’s army was so full of French officers seeking commissions that at first he worried about this new arrival, but in no time he was sharing his cloak with his newfound surrogate son. Clary notes that Washington had no qualms about sending Lafayette into mortal danger, and Lafayette none about putting himself there; there was nothing of nepotism, even elective, about the French officer’s rapid rise through the ranks. Lafayette’s fame grew even greater long after the war, when he returned for a tour of the U.S. and touched off a wave of places’ being named after him; when he died, “President [Andrew] Jackson called for the same honors that [John] Adams had ordered for Washington thirty-five years earlier.”
Reads well enough, but Clary’s account adds little to what is already known about either Washington or Lafayette.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2007
ISBN: 0-553-80435-9
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2006
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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