Comprehensive research and concise narrative ensure that this history will be the first stop for a new generation of Civil...
An exhaustive one-volume history presenting not only the major battles in Virginia but also illuminating such usually overlooked parts of the Civil War as western battles and naval actions.
Eicher (The Civil War in Books, not reviewed), associate editor of North and South magazine, provides a definitive military narrative that also serves as a reference guide to the technological and social challenges underlying the brutal combat. He begins by rehashing the well-known circumstances of Fort Sumter’s fall to the South and maintains this conventional tone as he describes individual episodes from the war: President Lincoln remains frustrated as he searches for aggressive military leadership; General Lee’s battlefield audacity at Chancellorsville still shines brilliantly in comparison to his decidedly amateur Union opponents; General Grant’s personal tenacity and drive to destroy the Army of Northern Virginia continue to be key to the North’s ultimate victory. Despite his mostly commonplace approach, Eicher provides a unique look at the relationships between the conflict’s major actions that other studies of the individual battles or campaigns fail to provide. By tracking troop movements between Eastern and Western operational theatres, he reveals both Union and Confederate attempts to implement national strategies that would result in ultimate victory. Eicher suggests that the coordinated actions of Grant in Virginia and Sherman further south finally pressured the South into submission. While other historians have described these battles and analyzed both Northern and Southern societies in far more detail, only Eicher has managed to assemble the myriad issues of the Civil War into a single, coherent volume.
Comprehensive research and concise narrative ensure that this history will be the first stop for a new generation of Civil War scholars, students, and enthusiasts. (49 maps)Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-84944-5
Page Count: 976
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
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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