A fine corrective to the traditional David-vs.-Goliath account of our War of Independence and a thoroughly entertaining read.
A fresh look at the Revolutionary War from an international perspective.
That America, with help from France, won independence by defeating the mighty British Empire may be the History Channel view, but it cuts no ice with the dozen international historians in this collection of lively, generously illustrated essays, a companion to a current exhibition at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. In their view, which is not controversial, the war began in 1775 as a Colonial rebellion but attracted attention from Britain’s European rivals, who supported it not-so surreptitiously and then openly. European powers offered a more potent threat than Colonial rebels. As naval history professor Andrew Lambert writes, they “could invade Britain, disrupt British trade, and attack British possessions in the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and India….Responding to these threats took priority over subduing the rebel colonists.” Soon after France declared war in 1778 (Spain joined in 1779), Britain re-evaluated its strategy. Trade, not national glory, supported its empire, and West Indian sugar islands were far more lucrative than North America. The same was true of Asia. By 1780, Britain was engaged in a life-or-death struggle, its outnumbered army and navy battling across the world from India to Africa to Latin American to the Mediterranean. After 1778, it sent more troops to the West Indies than to America. Some of those regiments were sent from America itself. Most startling of all, the contributors conclude that Britain won the world war. Losing the Colonies was upsetting, but France was bankrupt and Spain more moribund than ever. Britain became absolute master of the sea (always its first priority) and acquired a slew of new colonies. Within a generation, she possessed a new empire more extensive than the old. In addition to editors Allison and Ferreiro, the contributors include Alan Taylor, John Garrigus, and Kathleen DuVal.
A fine corrective to the traditional David-vs.-Goliath account of our War of Independence and a thoroughly entertaining read.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-58834-633-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Smithsonian Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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
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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