A pertinent history lesson, especially in this election year.
Civil War historian Ecelbarger (Three Days in the Shenandoah: Stonewall Jackson at Front Royal and Winchester, 2008, etc.) looks at the remarkable campaign that propelled Honest Abe to the presidency.
Having been defeated twice in four years for his bid to the U.S. Senate—against Stephen A. Douglas—Illinois attorney Lincoln was in a low point of his career by late 1858. His improbable rise to win the Republican Party’s nomination for president by 1860—against the great favorite, New York Senator William Seward—makes a compelling story, which is skillfully delineated by Ecelbarger. The future president’s debates with Douglas, a proponent of the controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, made Lincoln nationally famous, and proved to be the catalyst for his success. Committed friends like Jesse Fell and Judge David Davis kept his name on the back burner, concealing his true ambition, while in the name of party unity Lincoln modified his anti-slavery views, distancing himself from the abolitionists, whose stance he believed spelled political suicide. He also had to backpedal from his controversial “House Divided” speech of the previous year (“A house divided against itself cannot stand”), which seemed to presage civil war. The build-up to the nomination required Lincoln to travel outside the state of Illinois to court the press, as Ecelbarger amply demonstrates. The author creates a sympathetic, humane portrait of this ungainly character who did not like to discuss his humble upbringing and spoke instead about the demoralizing influence of slavery in clear, earnest terms. At the Republican convention in Chicago in May 1860, the committed but underfinanced Lincoln team confronted the Seward juggernaut and carried the day. Ecelbarger’s informed, readable account will appeal to both scholars and amateur historians.
A pertinent history lesson, especially in this election year.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-37413-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
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
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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