It may be impossible to write a dull book about Civil War battles, and this one is certainly enjoyable—but it’s history lite...
Two Civil War victories by the Union make this date the most important July 4 in US history—quibblers should know that the Declaration of Independence wasn’t signed on Independence Day.
Prolific historian Schultz (Quantrill’s War, 1996, etc.) offers a serviceable account of the two events accompanied by thumbnail biographies of the principle figures and a review of previous battles. Like most Americans, he sees the surrender of Vicksburg and the great battle in Pennsylvania as the beginning of the end for the South. Like all popular history, it’s not quite true. Despite four years of mostly Union defeats, the war east of the Mississippi remained a stalemate until near the end. On all other fronts, the South was in retreat from the first days. Yet any aspect of the Civil War possesses endless fascination and paradox. In the events of 1863, both leading generals seemed to switch historical roles. Grant, the brutal, straightforward slugger, fought the most brilliant campaign of the war in Mississippi. Cutting himself off from his supply line, he marched hundreds of miles through enemy country, winning half a dozen battles before laying siege to Vicksburg. At Gettysburg, Lee showed a puzzling lack of imagination, ordering repeated frontal assaults on well-defended positions. The author has written solid history in the past, but this is strictly mass-market entertainment and based largely on secondary sources. All traditional interpretations are accepted without question (Stonewall Jackson’s death doomed the South, Lee would have won Gettysburg if Longstreet had attacked on time). Traditional anecdotes appear in profusion. Women witness the carnage of battle and are horrified. Soldier after soldier has a premonition of death, and it’s never wrong.
It may be impossible to write a dull book about Civil War battles, and this one is certainly enjoyable—but it’s history lite nonetheless.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-393-04870-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
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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