A well-researched and original, if somewhat overwrought, history of Napoleon's fall from power, from his return from Moscow to his death in 1821 on the island of St. Helena. Hamilton-Williams (Waterloo: New Perspectives, not reviewed) has delved deeply into the military and diplomatic history of the last three years of Napoleon's reign and into the machinations of Talleyrand, his longtime foreign minister, and FouchÇ, his chief of police, both of whom played critical roles in his fall. The author's thesis is that the fall was brought about not by military failure, even at Waterloo, but by a series of carefully orchestrated betrayals. He argues that but for these Napoleon would have been able to defeat the divided allies in 1814, before his exile to Elba; and indeed the former emperor's popularity in France was such that, landing 11 months later with 1,100 men, it took only 20 days for him to retake France without casualties. Hamilton- Williams undercuts his argument that the allies should have accepted Napoleon's protestations of peace by noting that ``if he, Napoleon, could beat Wellington and Blucher...all that had been lost since 1812 might be regained.'' He also neglects the possibility that the Allies, after more than a decade of war, might have viewed Napoleon's overtures with some skepticism. The author's villains are the Bourbons, in particular the heir to the French throne, the comte d'Artois, whose intelligence organization committed a number of assassinations, including poisoning Napoleon himself (for which the evidence is indeed persuasive); and the British government, a ``contemptible clique,'' and its foreign minister, Castlereagh. Hamilton-Williams tells a stirring story, revealing much new material, but his partisanship is such that even Julius Caesar receives a whiff of grapeshot for setting his ``defiling foot'' on French soil. The illustrations, however, are outstanding.
Pub Date: March 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-471-11862-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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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