History as lived in the moment, messy and galvanizing.
How a middle-aged English immigrant’s words kickstarted the American Revolution and sustained it in its darkest days.
The first chapter thrusts us into a minutely detailed account of the Battle of Kips Bay, which forced George Washington to abandon New York City to the British in September 1776. Thomas Paine was among the rebel soldiers who viewed those catastrophic events from their post across the harbor in New Jersey, and historian Kelly rolls back from there to explain how an artisan with bitter personal experience of England’s brutally unfair class system came to America at age 37. Then it’s back to more battles in the fall of 1776 before Part 4 finally gets to Paine’s arrival in 1774 and the publication in January 1776 of his fiery pamphlet Common Sense, which persuaded dissatisfied colonists that what they wanted from Great Britain was not better treatment but independence. It’s an odd way to launch into a gripping soldier’s-eye view of the string of losses that the underequipped, inexperienced American troops experienced in late 1776, climaxing in the loss of two forts in New Jersey and Washington’s retreat west of the Delaware River, followed by a vivid analysis of Paine’s resulting we’re-not-licked-yet manifesto, The American Crisis. Once readers adjust to Kelly’s idiosyncratic organization, however, they will appreciate his ability to convey terrors and uncertainties of people who had no way of knowing how their struggle would turn out. Paine’s firsthand experience of those catastrophic battles gave him the moral authority, Kelly argues persuasively, to urge Americans to fight on. He reminds us that, in an age when many people could not read, Paine’s gift for simple, direct prose made his words equally effective when read aloud. Continuing with his detailed military history, Kelly depicts the reinvigorated patriot army following Washington across the Delaware in a bold gamble to turn crisis into opportunity. It worked, and the revolution would never be in quite such dire straits again.
History as lived in the moment, messy and galvanizing.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9781250331939
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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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