An accessible work of scholarship that will be of great interest to students of Civil War history.
A fresh interpretation of the Civil War that illuminates why Americans took up arms against each other—and why they thought they did.
Varon (American History/Univ. of Virginia; Appomattox: Victory, Defeat, and Freedom at the End of the Civil War, 2013) argues that the Union went to war with the Confederacy in the belief “that white Southerners could be redeemed”—redeemed, that is, from the tyranny of the planter class and the slaveholding economy and culture they imposed on the white working class. The premise of the South, conversely, was “that Northerners and Southerners could never again be countrymen.” Both suppositions had motive power, rousing armies to take to the field and fueling a bloody war that lasted for four years. Still, the Union belief that federal armies would be greeted with open arms as liberators in the South turned out to be fatally flawed; as Varon observes, “Lincoln and other Northern political figures and writers were clearly wrong about a Southern populace deceived and coerced into supporting the secessionist movement.” They had some reasons for thinking so, however, among them North Carolina’s slowness to secede and the fact that there were so many North Carolinians who “actively and sometimes violently rejected the demands of Confederate nationalism,” whether because they were Unionists or, as the war progressed, because they had deserted from Confederate armies—in fact, between 15 and 20 percent of the state’s soldiers did. Just as the South was not monolithic, so the Union had its fragments and factions. The author reckons that although Lincoln was successful in piecing together a coalition of Unionists of varying stripes, the Union army was not enthusiastic in its support for him or, at the war’s end, for Reconstruction, which helps explain why that decadelong effort is now widely considered a failure.
An accessible work of scholarship that will be of great interest to students of Civil War history.Pub Date: March 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-19-086060-8
Page Count: 520
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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
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
© 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.
