Interesting perhaps for some Civil War buffs in its portraits of everyday life under arms. For the rest, though, there’s...
“Most of the boys here think that we are just going to have a frolic,” wrote one South Carolinian before the Battle of Bull Run. It turned out to be rather more serious than all that, as this middling chronicle relates.
The Battle of Bull Run was more a colossal mess than a donnybrook, with respect to the title of Detzer’s (Emeritus, History/Connecticut State Univ.; Allegiance, 2001, etc.) latest work: it was inexpertly planned, turned on serious blunders, and provided a near–textbook example of the “fog of war.” Even so, only about a thousand soldiers were killed in the battle—a significant enough figure, Detzer writes, considering that “only 1,733 American soldiers had been killed during the entire Mexican War.” The chief virtue of Detzer’s overlong and overwritten account is its marshalling of such thought-provoking details: he notes, for instance, that a soldier’s woolen uniform weighed about four to six pounds and his backpack and other equipment about 40 more—far less weight than soldiers have to carry today, “but their burden tends to be much more artfully balanced”; and he affords a thorough look at how difficult it is, logistically and mechanically, to keep an army on the march through hostile countryside, which often leads to hungry, tired, and confused men being forced into battle. Unfortunately, however, Detzer tends to toss off characterizations—Jefferson Davis had no sense of humor, Pierre Beauregard was muscular but on the short side, Robert E. Lee was “certainly one of the best military minds of the era”—that do precious little to move the story or our understanding of history forward. And too often the prose sounds like Cormac McCarthy on a bad day: “. . . intestines handing like confetti from low bushes, soldiers with no faces or with holes blasted completely through them, men whose dying agonies had made them tug spasmodically at the grass until their fingertips turned green.”
Interesting perhaps for some Civil War buffs in its portraits of everyday life under arms. For the rest, though, there’s nothing particularly significant here.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-100889-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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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