A unique, often controversial description of Lee’s soldiers, their background and the conditions under which they fought.
Everything you ever wanted to know about the Army of Northern Virginia.
Ironies abound in this thick but highly readable tome from Glatthaar (History/UNC-Chapel Hill; Partners in Command: The Relationships Between Leaders in the Civil War, 1993, etc.). The wild enthusiasm following secession produced far more volunteers than the Confederate army could handle, but conscription became law in less than a year. Dissenting from the argument that Confederate soldiers fought for ideals we cherish today, the author states bluntly that Robert E. Lee’s men knew they were defending slavery. Historians traditionally emphasize that only one in 20 Southerners owned slaves, but Glatthaar points out that this neglects men who lived in households that included slaves: nearly half of enlisted men and virtually all officers. Even nonslaveholding soldiers took it for granted that Northern efforts to restrict slavery were a vicious attack on Southern freedom. For them, the idea that blacks deserved freedom was proof of Yankee insanity. Assuming command in June 1862, Lee vaulted from obscurity to acclaim during bloody battles that drove Union forces back from Richmond. He was an intelligent, aggressive general, perhaps too aggressive for a leader whose army had limited resources. When the fortunes of war favored him, Lee won great victories but always against weak opposing generals. Like Hannibal before and Rommel after him, his triumphs ended when he faced a competent adversary, in this case Ulysses S. Grant. While Glatthaar deals adequately with the battles, he shines in writing about the soldiers themselves. He finds the catchphrase “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight” to be exaggerated; poor, comfortable and prosperous men joined in equal numbers. Most gripping are the depressing details of the South’s persistent failure to supply Lee’s army: Soldiers often starved, dressed in rags and marched without shoes.
A unique, often controversial description of Lee’s soldiers, their background and the conditions under which they fought.Pub Date: March 18, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-684-82787-2
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007
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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