A knowledgeable, elegant account full of elaborate depictions, complete with a thorough bibliography.
A descriptive account of the people (both rebel and loyalist) and events that propelled the great rupture with Britain.
The period between the Boston Tea Party of December 1773 and the long siege of Boston in 1775 frames this finely delineated history of the buildup to revolution. Former Air Force officer and debut author Beck evidently relishes his subject, and he gives a fully fleshed portrait of the major patriots, both American and British. Dumping the tea in Boston Harbor was an act of destruction of private property, a notion no less sacred to the Americans than their liberty, and though many condemned the vandalism, the resistance to the tea duty had grown among the public as another instance of Parliament trying to “force-feed America a tax it had never consented to.” Fearful of the mob mentality that seemed to be brewing, Gen. Thomas Gage recommended to King George III that regiments earmarked for New York to keep order in Boston would be sufficient to render the Americans docile: they were “Lyons, whilst we are lambs,” he wrote. Little did he know the machinations already put in place by these “sly, artful, hypocritical rascalls [sic],” wrote Gen. Lord Percy of the rebels. Indeed, as Beck moves through the increasing lawlessness of the colonists, he points out the “ugly but very real side” to the American Revolution: “the American rebel seemed at times to take on the role of villain, turning the British into the victim.” The author explores the top-down intelligence network of Gage versus the grass-roots organization of the rebels, each effective in its own way. Beck’s description of the “spreading flames of rebellion” and the taking of the forts at Crown Point and Ticonderoga is as engaging as fiction.
A knowledgeable, elegant account full of elaborate depictions, complete with a thorough bibliography.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4926-1395-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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