Of interest to students of ethics and religious history; Civil War specialists will not find much new, but Stout offers an...
Was the Civil War just? Both sides thought so, writes religious historian Stout (American Religious History/Yale Univ.), but only one was correct by any modern calculus.
There are dangers in viewing long-past actions through modern eyes; what would have seemed perfectly natural to Caesar is today’s enormity. Stout reckons that “just-war theory” has been operational, though, for many centuries, and some of the concerns of those who fought in the Civil War remain of concern today. More remote are the notions of manhood that motivated behavior on both sides of the line, though any West Pointer will understand the agonies Southern cadets went through in determining what sort of duty and honor were owed to what country. (Stout notes that 21 Southern cadets remained to serve in the Union army, whereas all Southern students at Princeton went home.) Both sides searched for signs that theirs was the just one; both declared that God was with them. Had it been merely a bloodletting over states’ rights, Stout suggests, then neither side would have had much moral claim; but the fact that slavery was central to the argument and that the Union war widened—if only eventually—into an abolitionist one changed the equation. Along the way, visiting one moral dilemma after another, Stout remarks on Grant’s ending of prisoner exchanges, for instance, which came about because returned rebels violated parole to return to the ranks, and Grant reckoned that he could afford more men in prison than the Confederates could, a moral tap dance if ever there was one; and he notes that at a time of pandemic anguish during Lincoln’s second inauguration, the Christian right lamented not so much bloodshed or a broken nation as the fact that Andrew Johnson turned up drunk.
Of interest to students of ethics and religious history; Civil War specialists will not find much new, but Stout offers an interesting way of looking at well-known events.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2006
ISBN: 0-670-03470-3
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2005
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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