These authoritative essays, most of which appeared previously in various formats, will appeal mainly to serious students and...
A pre-eminent historian reflects on the Civil War’s lasting impact on the nation.
In 1861, Abraham Lincoln told Congress that the struggle to preserve the Union “is not altogether for today—it is for a vast future also.” In these essays from the past eight years, McPherson (Emeritus, History/Princeton Univ.; Embattled Rebel: Jefferson Davis as Commander in Chief, 2014, etc.) notes the public’s continuing fascination with the Civil War, with its 750,000 soldiers dead, its “larger-than-life, near mythical” figures like Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant, and its great “drama and romance and tragedy.” But at a deeper level, the conflict remains a lasting, seminal event in American history that transformed the average citizen’s relationship with government, sparked a historic shift in values toward positive liberty, and created the continuing “legacy of slavery in the form of racial discrimination and prejudice.” In many of the essays, McPherson reflects on the historiography of the war, including the ways in which academic historians’ enthusiasm for social as opposed to military history has affected scholarship on Lincoln. Several essays sharply criticize the work of specific historians, including Harry Stout for misrepresentations in Upon the Altar of the Nation (2006) and T. Harry Williams for his mistaken conclusion in Lincoln and His Generals (1952) that the president was a natural war strategist. Others explore topics from the expansion of slave states to wartime naval issues to the impact on American society of death and destruction on a massive scale. In a discussion of Lincoln and slavery, the author agrees with Eric Foner that the president was anti-slavery (deeming it a violation of natural rights) but not an abolitionist (he expected slavery would eventually die out).
These authoritative essays, most of which appeared previously in various formats, will appeal mainly to serious students and specialists.Pub Date: March 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-19-937577-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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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