by James P. Muehlberger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 3, 2013
Of possible interest to Jesse James and/or Civil War buffs, but not to a wider audience.
A Missouri legal historian's well-researched but lackluster answer to the question of whether Jesse James was "the last great rebel of the Civil War or the first notorious robber after [it].”
Since his death in 1882, outlaw Jesse James has been immortalized in books and films as the “noble robber” who committed crimes in the name of “protecting the former Confederate States from Northern exploitation.” Attorney Muehlberger takes exception to this myth and sets out to show that James was anything but noble. He seeks out the “smoking gun” in personal papers, newspaper reports and sworn testimonies from criminal trials involving both Jesse and his brother Frank. The author examines records of a successful suit brought against the James brothers by Henry McDougal, a man who not only founded Muehlberger’s law firm, but was also an important figure in late-19th-century Missouri politics. What emerges is a story of a man who was a faceless Confederate bushwhacker until 1869. In December of that year, he and his brother robbed a small-town Missouri bank, killed a former Union captain–turned-cashier and made off with another man’s prized thoroughbred horse. John Edwards, the Kansas City Times editor and a former Confederate soldier, seized upon the story and helped James write extravagant letters that extolled the virtues of the Confederate “Lost Cause.” According to Muehlberger, those letters not only created the Jesse James myth, but also diverted attention away from the fact that James supported his penchant for gambling and his taste for fine horses through theft and murder. James’ story is intriguing, but it often gets lost in the larger historical context Muehlberger provides, as well as in the detailed descriptions of court proceedings involving the James brothers.
Of possible interest to Jesse James and/or Civil War buffs, but not to a wider audience.Pub Date: June 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59416-173-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Westholme Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2013
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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