Top-drawer American history, especially for Civil War buffs.
A first-rate study of the origins and early years of the Civil War, focusing on neighboring communities North and South.
Drawing on a trove of documentary materials rich enough to make an annaliste swoon, Ayers (History/Univ. of Virginia; The Promise of the New South, 1992) delivers a unique portrait of two towns in the great valley that stretches “from Vermont all the way into Tennessee” that were, as those who lived there recognized, alike in many ways—yet crucially different in others. On the southern side stands Staunton, Virginia, a handsome agricultural town whose slave population was only beginning to grow in 1859, slaves having hitherto been important mostly to the lowland economy; on the northern side stands Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, not far from Staunton as the crow flies—and, in 1859, not far apart in other ways, notably its inhabitants’ opposition to abolitionism. Yet, as Ayers carefully documents, for whatever misgivings they may have had about the conflict between the two regions, both towns threw their all into the war between North and South; by the end both had been bled dry, but even in the early days of the war, boys and young men from Staunton and Chambersburg saw hard combat. Ayers explores a number of fascinating avenues, each of which would sustain a doctoral thesis or two: the reaction of Chambersburg’s African-American population to news of the Emancipation Proclamation, after which many went to Massachusetts to enlist in the famed, ill-fated 54th Regiment; the role of northern transplants such as the schoolmaster Jed Hotchkiss in settling western Virginia and defending it against other northerners (“[Stonewall] Jackson and Robert E. Lee soon came to trust Hotchkiss completely and rely on his maps, knowledge, energy, and advice”); the complicated politics of abolition in the north and the widespread dislike of Lincoln on free soil, with many northerners fearing that Lincoln’s policies would only “unite and exasperate the whites of the South in their resistance to the National Government, and to make the war still more prolonged, bloody and bitter”; and the day-to-day conduct of the war in the Great Valley and its effects on its residents.
Top-drawer American history, especially for Civil War buffs.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-393-05786-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
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 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
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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