A solid overview, well suited to Civil War buffs.
A well-crafted survey of the five presidents—Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Harrison, and McKinley—who emerged from the ranks of the Union Army.
The crucible of war has forged plenty of our nation’s leaders, writes political journalist Perry (A Bohemian Brigade, 2000, etc.), and even though the citizenry has supposedly shied from letting the military get too close to politics, service in the armed forces has been the rule rather than the exception for most chief executives. The Civil War produced those five leaders, who, for better or worse, guided the nation through the Gilded Age. “They all fought in battles so desperate and bloody we can barely comprehend them,” Perry observes. About those battles—the hells of Chickamauga, Shiloh, Atlanta, and others—he writes fluently and memorably. He has less to say about just how their battlefield experiences affected these presidents’ time in office after the war, though he volunteers that Grant never seemed quite able to comprehend the complexity of civilian politics and that Garfield’s skills as a backstabber, fine-tuned as a self-serving staff officer, found a perfect arena in the White House. Still, Perry does a good job of giving a you-are-there account of the presidents’ seasons under fire and of drawing attention to often overlooked figures: Rutherford B. Hayes, who was wounded four times and fought bravely in a dozen major engagements; William McKinley, who served under Hayes and proved a hero at the Battle of Antietam; and Benjamin Harrison, a capable officer under William Tecumseh Sherman’s command, even if it was true that “not many people actually liked him,” thanks to his lack of social skills. Although he has but qualified praise for their work as politicians, Perry writes admiringly of their many contributions to the Union cause, with even a grudging nod to Garfield, “the smartest, the most devious, the most political of all these Civil War presidents.”
A solid overview, well suited to Civil War buffs.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-58648-114-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
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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