A noteworthy addition to the groaning shelves of Gettysburg books: superb narrative enriched in equal measure by careful...
From Civil War historian Wert (A Brotherhood of Valor, 1999, etc.), an astute mixture of strategic analysis and common soldiers’ narratives detailing the 24 climactic hours on which the Union hinged.
Out of 51,000 casualties at the Battle of Gettysburg, approximately one-third fell on July 3, 1863. Since then, debates on responsibility for success and failure have raged almost as heatedly as bullets on that final day. Wert’s reconsideration won’t resolve all controversies, but he sees with admirable clarity through the fog of postwar mythmaking. The historian argues that longtime Confederate scapegoat Gen. James Longstreet performed his duty (except for one momentary lapse), even though he vigorously disagreed with Robert E. Lee’s order to assault the center of the Federal line at Cemetery Ridge. Wert further points out that Lee’s vague orders and passive supervision produced poorly coordinated attacks. With clear analyses of tactics and vivid miniature portraits, he demonstrates that equally important in deciding the outcome was the skill of Union commander George Meade and such subordinates as Winfield Scott Hancock, Henry Hunt, Alexander Hays, and John Gibbon, who anticipated Confederate tactics and steadied their men amid unbelievable confusion and carnage. Although Pickett’s charge of course gets its due here, so do other crucial actions, including the daybreak fighting at Culp’s Hill, which secured the Federal position; the Confederate cannonade preceding Pickett’s charge, whose failure to damage the Union batteries doomed the infantry assault before it started; and a late-afternoon cavalry clash, which served notice on the Confederates that their Northern counterparts would match them in future engagements. Ordinary soldiers’ accounts in letters and diaries illuminate the extraordinary heroism needed to survive the bloodletting throughout the day (e.g., at one Union field hospital, surgeons had 18 amputating tables simultaneously in use).
A noteworthy addition to the groaning shelves of Gettysburg books: superb narrative enriched in equal measure by careful tactical judgment and vigorous storytelling.Pub Date: July 3, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-85914-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2001
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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