by David A. Clary ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 28, 2009
A lively history of the war that humiliated Mexico and accounts for an enduring grudge against its northern neighbor.
The former chief historian for the U.S. Forest Service examines one of the most ignominious chapters in American history: the Mexican-American War.
It’s a measure of Mexico’s continuing weak-sister status that the 1846-1848 conflict—because of its implications for the contentious issue of American slavery and because it introduced characters that later loomed much larger in American history—is still too often treated by Anglos as a mere dress rehearsal for the Civil War. Clary (Adopted Son: Washington, Lafayette, and the Friendship that Saved the Revolution, 2007, etc.) considers the war on its own terms, giving particular attention to both sides’ mismanagement of the bloody enterprise. With the exception of the dutiful Kit Carson, virtually none of the well-known historical figures come off creditably here. These include a succession of hapless U.S. ministers to Mexico; the many prominent intellectuals and Whigs who ineffectually opposed this “most unrighteous war”; the micromanaging, near-paranoid President James Polk; the vainglorious caudillo Santa Anna; “The Pathfinder,” John C. Fremont, a blundering egomaniac richly deserving of his court martial; “Old Rough and Ready,” Zachary Taylor, who kept one eye on his political future while allowing horrible atrocities by his occupying army; and “Old Fuss and Feathers,” Winfield Scott, a competent army administrator but a dull-witted soldier in the field. Both generals owed their victories to a talented officer corps, superior artillery and the enemy’s poverty, corruption and inefficiency. The war began with each country announcing the other had invaded and ended with Mexico losing half (counting Texas) its territory. Readers put off by Clary’s occasional too-breezy locutions—he refers, for example, to America’s lust for the continent’s west coast as “California dreaming”—will inevitably succumb to the narrative’s headlong spirit, recounting one slapdash improvisation after another that rearranged the continental map.
A lively history of the war that humiliated Mexico and accounts for an enduring grudge against its northern neighbor.Pub Date: July 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-553-80652-6
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2009
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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