Ably explored and told, The Prisoners of Cabrera will be of considerable interest to students of the Napoleonic era and of...
Able were they ere they saw Cabrera: a fascinating exploration of an all-but-forgotten footnote in French history.
Though books devoted to Napoleon Bonaparte make up a vast library—it’s been said that only Jesus and Hitler have earned more ink—few explore the bloody campaigns waged in Spain and Portugal. Canadian historian Smith examines the waning days of the French attempt to seize Iberia, when the Spanish government quit the Bonapartist cause and, in essence, put its forces under British command. Most of the defeated Napoleonic army was allowed to return on parole to France, but, at British orders, 12,000 troops who had surrendered to the Spanish after the Battle of Bailen were packed off to a desolate island off the coast of Majorca and abandoned to live as “Gallic Robinson Crusoes.” Many thousands of them died. Others formed guerrilla bands and plotted elaborate plans for escape that, with one or two exceptions, failed. Smith looks in particular at one effort by members of the elite Imperial Guard to build a boat out of scrap and odd materials, some supplied by crewmen from an English brigantine “in a clandestine gesture of sympathy for the exiles.” Still others went off to live as hermits with the wild goats in the hills. Finally returned to France after five years, many of the surviving prisoners experienced what would today be classified as post-traumatic stress disorder, “manifested in anxiety, depression, sleep disturbance, or similar complaints.” Scarcely any of them are known to history, and the whole Cabrera incident, Smith points out, was reduced to a single paragraph in a standard British history of the war—which lay the entire blame on the Spanish government for its “indefensible treatment” of the French prisoners.
Ably explored and told, The Prisoners of Cabrera will be of considerable interest to students of the Napoleonic era and of issues of military justice.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2001
ISBN: 1-56858-212-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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