The hymn’s growth and adaptation provides a decent story, but not a 300-page one; 100 would have been more than sufficient.
The history of the hymn that began as a revival hymn in 1807, morphed into a soldiers’ marching song and served to replace sorrow with resolve as it did after 9/11.
Stauffer (English and American Literature; African-American Studies/Harvard Univ.; Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, 2008, etc.) and Soskis (Nonprofit Management, Philanthropy and Policy/George Mason Univ.) trace the song’s beginnings as “Say Brothers, Will You Meet us” to “John Brown’s Body” and Julia Ward Howe’s version written in 1861. The song has been used to reflect national ideals, borrowing images from the Bible as a call to action whenever war reared its ugly head. The Howe version became a symbol of the reunification of the North and South, at least in the North. The hymn highly offended Confederates, as it reminded them of the words of the "John Brown’s Body" version sung by Union soldiers, which swore to hang “Jeff Davis from a sour apple tree.” Various versions with new or adjusted lyrics have appeared, modifying the song’s imperialistic bent and millennial aspersions. It has been used to express fears, feuds, righteousness and a providentially blessed nation in times of crisis, and it invariably rouses the masses. This powerful song has been called into action by such diverse causes as labor movements, Spanish-American War anti-imperialists, Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Party, Billy Sunday, Billy Graham and leaders of the civil rights movement. Unfortunately, the lengthy biographies of the various adapters of the lyrics are superfluous and, quite frankly, boring.
The hymn’s growth and adaptation provides a decent story, but not a 300-page one; 100 would have been more than sufficient.Pub Date: June 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-19-983743-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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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