With efficiency and élan, Ecelbarger gives an often overlooked battle its due.
Civil War historian Ecelbarger (The Great Comeback: How Abraham Lincoln Beat the Odds to Win the 1860 Republican Nomination, 2008, etc.) closely examines the crucial battle of the campaign for Atlanta, the war’s most decisive engagement.
Antietam, Vicksburg, Gettysburg—each marked an important turning point in the Civil War, but none spelled the end for the South as did Atlanta. Militarily, the daylong battle on July 22, 1864, the bloodiest day of the war’s last ten months, assured the eventual capture of the South’s most important rail and commercial center. Politically, Atlanta’s surrender guaranteed Lincoln’s reelection, eliminating any chance that the war-weary North would allow the Confederacy to go its own way or return to the Union with slavery in place. Military buffs will appreciate Ecelbarger’s meticulous recounting of the battle—he breaks the action into increments as narrow as 15 minutes—the ferocity of which accounted for more than 10,000 casualties and kept one out of five participants from answering the next day’s roll call. The author’s careful reconstruction demonstrates how, with four hours of daylight remaining, the outcome could easily have turned into a Union disaster. Readers less consumed with precisely how the battle unfolded will likely prefer the numerous, sharp appraisals of the officers and soldiers. Conspicuous for the South was the aggressive John Bell Hood, whose command featured the likes of hard-drinking and hard-fighting Benjamin Cheatham, oft-wounded William “Shot Pouch” Walker, young “Fighting Joe” Wheeler, experienced Patrick Cleburne and William Hardee, who led the flanking maneuver critical to Hood’s designs. Gen. James McPherson, a protégé of Grant and Sherman, led the Northern army and died in the battle, but the slack was taken up by the inspirational John Logan, the tenacious Mortimer Leggett and Medal of Honor winners Manning Force and John Sprague. Their battlefield heroics enabled a triumphant Sherman to telegraph his president, two months before the election Lincoln believed lost, “Atlanta is ours, and fairly won.”
With efficiency and élan, Ecelbarger gives an often overlooked battle its due.Pub Date: Nov. 23, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-56399-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2010
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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