A true-adventure story that also documents how prisoner abuse and recriminations spurred the federal commitment to the...
The harrowing, little-known story of the 109 Union officers who escaped from a Richmond prison in 1864—an episode that deserves a higher place in Civil War lore.
Former AP reporter and editor Wheelan (Mr. Adams's Last Crusade: John Quincy Adams's Extraordinary Post-Presidential Life in Congress, 2008, etc.) fastidiously establishes the circumstances and conditions leading to the desperate actions of Union officers, held separately from enlisted men per conventions of the time, to break out of Libby Prison, a former vast tobacco warehouse on the Richmond riverfront. As the war moved through the fall of 1863, the Confederate economy was fast unraveling, with civilian privation the norm, particularly in cities. Yankee prisoners, even officers, were at the end of the line for the South's rapidly shrinking food supply. (Conditions were far better for Rebel captives held in the North—the author suggests that many were better fed and cared for than they had been in their own ranks.) An ornate system of parole and exchanges had prevailed at the war's outset, offering hope of a short internment for captives of both sides. But with the Emancipation Proclamation from a politically rejuvenated Lincoln, the South rejected leniency. They refused to parole captured black troops, often executing them on the battlefield, and they put white officers on trial for inciting slave revolt, a capital crime. As conditions worsened at Libby, two officers took the lead in finding an ingenious way to get into a cellar through their kitchen fireplace. The first tunnel was scraped with makeshift tools but descended too far and was flooded by a nearby canal. Three others were dug, amid hordes of rats, filth and sewage, before breakout was achieved in February 1864. Some were killed and recaptured, but 52 escapees made it back to Union lines, all with tales to tell.
A true-adventure story that also documents how prisoner abuse and recriminations spurred the federal commitment to the “total war” that ravaged the South.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-58648-716-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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 Yorker staff 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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