A flawed chronicle of the two 1863 Tennessee battles in the Civil War that fell on the heels of Gettysburg and Vicksburg. The War between the States, the true American epic, warrants a Homer to tell the tale, but Bowers is not in the least Homeric. The author, who also wrote Stonewall Jackson (1989), places far too much emphasis on the historical importance of these two battles. A native Tennessean, he has a natural interest in them, but the fact remains that Gettysburg and Vicksburg, not these later engagements, sounded the death knell for the Confederacy. Bowers does a decent job of profiling such generals as the Rebel eccentric Braxton Bragg, known for the fiery flatulence of both his temper and his digestive system (he had caught chronic Montezuma's Revenge during the Mexican War). He also paints good portraits of Union general William Starke Rosecrans (known by the sobriquet ``Old Rosey'') and the Confederate hotspur Nathan Bedford Forrest. Bowers's best writing is his description of General Grant's arrival at Chattanooga. Grant was the ``people's general'' whose plain, unassuming manner made him a hero as much as his victories on the battlefield. Bowers spends too much time on Chickamauga and too little on Chattanooga, which is a far more compelling story. He also does not serve the account well by inserting dubious dialogue by the major participants in the course of the narrative. Bowers's writing is stilted, repetitive, and clichÇ-ridden. Despite such limitations, Civil War buffs north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line will still find enough in this book not to be entirely disappointed.
Pub Date: May 31, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-016592-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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 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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