An expert, detailed account that should remain the definitive account for quite some time.
A skillful history of two years of fighting along the Mississippi River that ended with the July 1863 surrender of the fortress at Vicksburg.
Miller (Emeritus, History/Lafayette Coll.; Supreme City: How Jazz Age Manhattan Gave Birth to Modern America, 2014, etc.) begins in May 1861, when the first Union warship arrived to blockade the Mississippi. Nearly a year passed before Adm. David Farragut’s fleet captured New Orleans, but Vicksburg, on a high bluff, refused to surrender despite several naval bombardments. Mostly, the author recounts Ulysses Grant’s drive south, an operation that made him a national hero. Although more aggressive than most Union generals, his early efforts showed little skill. Luckily, his opponents showed less, and his February 1862 capture of forts Henry and Donelson in Tennessee made headlines. Rewarded with an army, he moved south and fought off a surprise attack at the Battle of Shiloh in April. Its massive casualties cast a pall over his reputation, and his superior took over command. He regained it in July and kept pushing toward Vicksburg. A November march through eastern Mississippi failed after raiders destroyed his supply depot. From December to March 1863, Grant made a half-dozen attempts: one by land, others by boat, helped by dynamiting levees or digging canals. Miller vividly recounts the painful details of their failures. In April, after laboriously constructing a 70-mile road over swamps and rivers, Grant’s army marched down west of the river and crossed over. Now south of Vicksburg on open ground, it won several battles and besieged the city, which surrendered after five weeks. "Vicksburg,” writes the author, “was that rare thing in military history: a decisive battle, one with war-turning strategic consequences.” Less enthusiastic historians point out that cutting off the trans-Mississippi states did not greatly weaken the Confederacy, as the subsequent 21 months of bitter fighting demonstrated. Still, it was the most satisfying Union campaign of the war, and Miller chronicles it with aplomb.
An expert, detailed account that should remain the definitive account for quite some time.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4137-0
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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