A lively account of an important period in Theodore Roosevelt's career, when he first entered the national stage as a statesman, helped transform the US into a world power, and distinguished himself as a hero of the Spanish-American war. Jeffers (Commissioner Roosevelt, 1994, etc.), a journalist and the author of 20 books, focuses on Roosevelt's experiences just before and during the war. He argues that Roosevelt, as assistant secretary of the navy, anticipated the problems of armed and aggressive nationalism that would lead to two world wars. As a result, he energetically pursued the creation of an alert, efficient navy, despite America's general lack of concern about threats from abroad, particularly Japan's attempted annexation of strategic Pacific islands (like Hawaii) and weaker Asian countries (like the Philippines and Korea). Relentless pressure from Roosevelt eventually resulted in the building of a large and efficient navy, which kept powerful European fleets from threatening US security and other nations from expanding into the Western hemisphere. Also, American annexation of Hawaii in 1897, prompted by Roosevelt, deterred Japan from further Pacific adventures. But T.R. wasn't just a strategist: When war with Spain broke out, he took an active part. Drawing from Roosevelt's voluminous letters, diaries, and memoirs, as well as government records and secondary sources, Jeffers amply covers Colonel Roosevelt's heroics in Cuba with his Rough Riders and his emergence as a leader and national figure. The rise of Theodore Roosevelt parallels the rise of the US as a world power. Jeffers is convincing in asserting that T.R. was highly instrumental both in bringing attention to the problem of foreign powers operating near our shores and along our Pacific frontier, and in strengthening American resolve and national defenses. (14 photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 19, 1996
ISBN: 0-471-12678-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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 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
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