A highly accessible chronicling of the Civil War’s pivotal year. Prize-winning historian Stevens (Hoover Dam: An American Adventure, not reviewed) presents the important political and military developments of 1863, a year that crippled the Confederacy’s hopes for national independence. In January, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, enabling the Union to seize the war’s moral high ground. With one stroke of the pen, Lincoln rendered the Confederacy an international pariah. On the battlefield, the Union began asserting its industrial and numerical superiority. In Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, Lincoln finally found commanders who would wage a relentless war of attrition, attacking the enemy and bleeding it (and themselves) dry. During his long siege of Vicksburg, Grant’s army dug miles of trenches, blazed away with heavy artillery, and waited for the starving city to surrender. On July 4, the Confederates raised the white flag over Vicksburg, giving Union forces complete control of the Mississippi River. Meanwhile, Robert E. Lee marched north into Pennsylvania, hoping to surprise the Union army. At Gettysburg, the bloodiest battle of the Civil War resulted in a second major Union victory. Lee’s battered army crawled back into Virginia. In just one disastrous week, the Confederacy had been split in half and its army beaten back to the suburbs of Richmond. While Stevens provides an excellent analysis of battlefield tactics, he’s less effective on the political front. Considering the plethora of Lincoln scholarship, Stevens’s portrait of the president lacks nuance and depth. We never sense Lincoln’s brilliant navigation between idealism and practical politics. Yet Stevens must be commended for including informative, colorful vignettes of Walt Whitman, Andrew Carnegie, Louisa May Alcott, and John D. Rockefeller. Throughout, the prose is simple and easily digested. A solid, largely successful history of 1863 aimed at the general reader. (illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: April 13, 1999
ISBN: 0-553-10314-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
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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