A lively, expertly rendered narrative of politics as a prelude to war.
A specialist in African-American history examines the tumultuous 1860 presidential election, perhaps the most consequential in American history.
In the immediate wake of his election, even the shrewd Lincoln didn’t quite believe the South meant its drive for secession, maybe even war. His longtime adversary Stephen A. Douglas knew better. Douglas emerged from the long campaign with his Democratic Party broken by the machinations of fire-eaters like Alabama’s William Lowndes Yancey and South Carolina’s Robert Rhett, who were deeply committed to slaveholding interests. They had already prompted a walkout of Southern delegates to the Democratic Convention in Charleston, S.C. and masterminded the nomination of John C. Breckinridge, effectively extinguishing Douglas’s electoral chances. With the Democrats divided, border states coalescing around the third-party candidacy of Tennessee’s John Bell and militant abolitionists supporting reformer and philanthropist Gerrit Smith’s Liberty Party, the path was clear for the Republicans, who declined to nominate their controversial frontrunner William Seward, to win the White House. Making liberal use of contemporary accounts by intrepid Cincinnati journalist Murat Halstead, Egerton (History/Le Moyne College; Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America, 2009, etc.) captures the dynamics of the caucuses and conventions—including the later Confederate gathering in Montgomery that nominated Jefferson Davis and the D.C. peace conference prior to Lincoln’s inauguration—neatly summarizes the distinctions among the parties, shrewdly assesses the various candidates’ assets and liabilities and demonstrates that the year’s political fireworks centered on “the accursed institution,” specifically slavery in the territories, the single issue no longer susceptible to compromise. From the outset, the fire-eaters intended to disrupt the Union, dismissing the Republicans as a merely “sectional party.” They sought to establish a separate, slaveholding republic they believed the north too greedy and cowardly to recapture.
A lively, expertly rendered narrative of politics as a prelude to war.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-59691-619-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
