This sensitive study examines at the local level the radically transforming nature of what is often simplistically viewed as the world's most conservative revolution. In the 1760s, Charles County, Md., seemed a typically stable community: a Chesapeake society in which a Protestant male gentry expected and received deference from indentured servants, women, Roman Catholics (then disenfranchised), and slaves. Lee (History/Univ. of Wisconsin) demonstrates how, only three decades later, that world had changed utterly. The Revolutionary War sparked a hearts-and-minds effort to save the new republic, as residents made Tories unwelcome, rounded up munitions, food, and clothing, and joined the militia. With the war won, the county exhibited optimism about its commercial future and greater acceptance of previously marginalized groups. Many slaves had won freedom through lawsuits and manumission; bound labor among whites was almost eliminated; religious liberty was extended to all; women had improved their status substantially; and, of course, its inhabitants, like all others in the newly independent United States, no longer owed allegiance to a king. The toll was immense, however. Largely because of massive debt, soil depletion, and other economic dislocations caused by the war, Charles County began a period of long-term decline after 1790, with many residents departing for a new life elsewhere. By the Civil War, it had 20% fewer people than at the time of George Washington's inauguration. Lee makes excellent use of a variety of local records to explain how this society, having caught the winds of change, suddenly and ruefully discovered that those winds were of gale force. Her work vividly affirms what she calls ``the value of seeking the general through the particular—of finding in the close examination of one place the outlines of an entire era.'' An illuminating local history, reflecting an emerging nation's tribulations. (Photos and maps, not seen)
Pub Date: June 27, 1994
ISBN: 0-393-03658-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1994
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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