A minor footnote to journalistic and Civil War history.
That Abe Lincoln. First he crushes states’ rights, then suspends the writ of habeas corpus. Next thing you know, he’ll want to demolish the First Amendment.
The subtitle of Manber and Dahlstrom’s exposé is overheated, but, as they hold, the media-savvy Lincoln had no fondness for the opposition Democratic newspapers that every Northern city harbored. In early August 1861, Lincoln signed a bill that authorized the confiscation of property used for “insurrectionary purposes,” though he considered the bill a bit premature. A couple of weeks later, vigilantes broke into the offices of a Pennsylvania newspaper published by a fierce Lincoln-hater named John Hodgson, broke up its type and destroyed the subscription lists. In their characteristically ham-fisted way, Manber and Dahlstrom consider this “one of the most calculated attacks on American liberty since the exploding cannon and dull thud of Revolutionary muskets ceased.” Though it seems a milk run for Watergate, with cunning Republicans gunning for antiwar Democrats, to consider the attack a sweeping assault on freedom of the press may be a little overstated, despite Hodgson’s—and the authors’—protestations. Still, it’s clear that persons higher up, including Lincoln’s secretary of war, knew of and approved the attack on Hodgson’s property; that much is evident by the fact that afterward, government marshals ordered the paper shut down permanently. The attack brought forth a storm of dissent from editors, who issued a resolution “that the Republican Party has proved that all its pretensions of devotion to freedom, free speech, and free discussions were simply cloaks to conceal their real enmity to liberty.” Hodgson sued, charging the government officials who shut him down with illegal trespass; eventually, he recovered $512 in damages, and he continued to publish anti-Lincoln and antiwar pieces all through the Civil War.
A minor footnote to journalistic and Civil War history.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-4022-0398-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2005
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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