Solid if overgrown addition to Civil War literature.
On the forging of Ulysses S. Grant as an indispensable leader in the Civil War.
Grant was a somewhat reluctant soldier who confessed, as a West Point cadet, that “a military life had no charms for me.” Yet, he was a quick study in battle as a young lieutenant in the Mexican-American War and not shy of criticizing poor decisions on the part of superiors. An abolitionist, unlike so many other Union officers and soldiers, he was quick to take up arms when the Civil War broke out. Historian McDonough opens with a critical campaign early in the war, when Grant coordinated joint army and naval assaults on a chain of riverside Confederate strongholds in Tennessee; his victory, McDonough argues, was “the first turning point of the Civil War.” Grant distinguished himself from many another Union commander for his willingness to attack, and he had little tolerance for subordinates who did not share his recognition of “the value of the offensive.” (One who did, General Charles Smith, memorably urged his troops, “You volunteered to be killed for your country and now you can be.”) It was at Fort Donelson that Grant first issued his trademark demand for “unconditional surrender.” Much of McDonough’s narrative is given over to Grant’s Vicksburg campaign, which saw a great deal of trial and error as he attempted to find a way to bombard the city from Union gunboats without their being sunk by Confederate artillery. That narrative is overgrown with briar patches of detail that threaten to lose the nonspecialist reader, but McDonough offers valuable insights on such matters as Grant’s recruitment of formerly enslaved men as soldiers despite “opposition emanating from both high-ranking officers and [white] men in the ranks.” McDonough also gets overheated here and there, as when he plaintively argues that Vicksburg, and not Gettysburg, was the truly decisive victory that signaled the beginning of the end for the Confederacy.
Solid if overgrown addition to Civil War literature.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2026
ISBN: 9781324130420
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2026
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 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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