A worthy additional contribution to the burgeoning literature, timed for the bicentennial of Mr. Jefferson’s vast...
Lively account of America’s first giant step toward empire.
The American settlement of the trans-Appalachian West had already begun when Thomas Jefferson went off to Paris in 1786, writes Kukla (Director/Patrick Henry Memorial Foundation), as land-hungry immigrants from the British Isles poured over the frontier into lands claimed by Spain and, following the rise of Napoleon, by France. Some of those newcomers weren’t above a little treason to secure their fortunes under the Spanish crown; throughout the US, secessionist movements and rebellions against federal authority were flourishing, and Jefferson had every reason to worry about the emergence of rival confederations set up by Americans as much as he did the intransigent British and other European powers on the frontier. To contain all these ambitions required an ever-expanding empire, Jefferson recognized—but, he warned, “we should take care to not . . . press too soon on the Spaniards. Those countries [of the West] cannot be in better hands. My fear is that they are too feeble to hold them till our population can be sufficiently advance to gain it from them piece by piece.” While Jefferson and company’s intensive negotiations with the Spanish and French governments over nearly two decades form the heart of this thoroughly detailed account, Kukla lifts his eyes above the conference table to show how accidents of history hastened the acquisition of the Louisiana territory along—notably a slave rebellion in Haiti that kept much of the overseas French army pinned down and thus thwarted Napoleon’s “dream of a revived empire” in North America, but also the strange indifference of Congress, which might have stopped Jefferson in his tracks had its members worried too much about the constitutionality of the purchase.
A worthy additional contribution to the burgeoning literature, timed for the bicentennial of Mr. Jefferson’s vast acquisition.Pub Date: April 10, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-40812-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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