Princeton historian McPherson has produced what is unapologetically—in heft, in physical design, in the use of myriad headings and subheadings—a high-class undergraduate textbook. It does not so much supplant The Civil War and Reconstruction (Rev. 1969), by J. G. Randall and David Donald, as offer a worthy alternative—incorporating not only recent research findings but also far more detail on non-political matters and much quotation from contemporary and other sources. (McPherson's previous works—The Struggle for Equality and The Negro's Civil War—have made notable use of documentary material.) But, jam-packed with information, it is much more a book to learn from than a book to read. Most interesting in the larger scheme of things is the section on pre-Civil war currents—the modernizing, reformist Yankee Protestant ethos; the contrasting Southern socioeconomic order ("Herrenvolk democracy"); the anti-slavery movement ("the most modernized sector of the economy") and the proslavery counterattack (the "siege mentality," the wage-slave theme, the cavalier image). Moving into the war, McPherson pauses to explain "the process of raising a three-year regiment" and the specific advantages of the newly-perfected rifle; the outstanding feature of the material on the war itself—one not to be disparaged—is probably the maps. To that must be added—reflective of the whole—McPherson's attention to the role of blacks (the debate over their recruitment, the conditions under which they served). On Reconstruction—which he extends to 1890—McPherson is precise and pointed. Klansmen renegades? Not so: "Klansmen came from all social classes and their leaders were often prominent men or the sons of prominent men. . . . Their hit-and-run guerrilla tactics made them, in effect, a paramilitary arm of the Southern Democratic Party's effort to overthrow Republican rule in the South." Less than compulsive reading—but a valuable book to have around.
Pub Date: Feb. 18, 1982
ISBN: 0072317361
Page Count: 816
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1982
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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