A handy volume that efficiently covers all the essentials.
A Civil War specialist’s nutshell assessment of a famously dysfunctional relationship.
In the summer of 1862 a frustrated senator urged Abraham Lincoln to relieve Gen. George McClellan from command, begging the president to replace the Little Napoleon “with anybody.” Lincoln was well-acquainted with the general’s flaws—his proclivity for secrecy, his tendency to micromanage, his constant demands for more troops, his contemptuous treatment of superiors in the government and officers under him and, most of all, his reluctance to aggressively pursue Lee’s army—and his saintly patience was dwindling. At the war’s outset, McClellan’s appointment made sense. The decrepitude of the old Mexican War hero Winfield Scott and the defection of many of the nation’s top officers to the Confederacy left a vacuum the remarkably young McClellan easily filled thanks to his exceptional training, distinguished service in Mexico and victories in several early skirmishes in Western Virginia. He quickly set about drilling and refurbishing the army, secured a teetering capital against attack, restored confidence and inspired devotion from his troops. The strutting general saw himself as the Union’s savior, floating above and deeply resenting the filthy political scrum. As superintendent of the Illinois Central Railroad before the war, the genteel, broadly educated, socially adept McClellan had employed Lincoln as occasional legal counsel. He neither liked nor respected the unsophisticated prairie lawyer, a feeling he never abandoned. Lincoln finally dismissed McClellan in November 1862, making the general the immediate frontrunner for the bitterly divided Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. McClellan’s landslide 1864 electoral defeat ended his tortured connection to Lincoln. Explaining without dwelling on McClellan’s deficiencies in the field, Waugh (One Man Great Enough: Abraham Lincoln’s Road to Civil War, 2007, etc.) neatly focuses on the general’s tragic inability to subordinate himself to a man whose greatness he never understood.
A handy volume that efficiently covers all the essentials.Pub Date: May 11, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-230-61349-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2010
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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