A fascinating study of an intriguing case. (15 pages of photos)
The true significance of the “Almanac Trial” is revealed by historical detective and novelist Walsh (Midnight Dreary, 1998, etc.) in this engrossing account of how history is made and lost.
In November 1857, less than a year before the Lincoln-Douglas debates, the lawyer and would-be senator from Springfield, Illinois, received a request he felt he had to honor. It was the dying wish of an old friend, James Armstrong, that Lincoln represent his son, who was on trial for murder. Lincoln was not, in fact, an especially good criminal defense attorney: Walsh documents that, prior to the Armstrong case, when faced with a client’s certain guilt, Honest Abe would either pull out of the defense or end up doing such a half-hearted job that the accused would get convicted anyway. One defense witness in the Armstrong case hinted broadly at the guilt of the defendant by stating that “he knew too much” to be of much use and, after the trial, told a juror that he had seen the defendant commit the crime. (This last delicious tidbit was uncovered by an amateur historian 50 years later, but it has been hitherto ignored.) No one knows if Lincoln thought his client was guilty, but if he did, it didn’t show. He gave his client a tough, artful defense, which included consulting an almanac to discredit a prosecution witness who claimed that he saw the murder clearly because the moon was high in the sky. (The almanac showed that the moon was lower on the horizon.) In considering what Lincoln might have known about the case, Walsh wonders, “which is more in order for what he did, censure or sympathy?” But his telling of the conflict between honesty and loyalty that Lincoln likely faced is clearly sympathetic. Perhaps it is simply the contemporary climate that leads Walsh to ask this question—as if the story he has told is not interesting enough.
A fascinating study of an intriguing case. (15 pages of photos)Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-22922-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
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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