As warm and enticing as an oral history, with lots more footnotes.
A thorough, revealing history of an important political and military family from Ohio during the Civil War.
Rising from an impoverished family, Thomas Ewing Sr. (1789–1871) became a man of wealth and connections, a lawyer, a senator, a wise international political mind (he counseled Lincoln not to antagonize Britain as the Civil War loomed), a real estate developer and secretary of the Treasury and Interior. In a state riven by the debate over abolition, he took a middle road in hopes of saving the Union. He finally hewed to the North, as did his sons, all of whom became key military figures and one a chief justice. The family was certainly a dynasty, and Heineman (History/Angelo State Univ.; Put Your Bodies Upon the Wheels: Student Revolt in the 1960s, 2001, etc.) examines it with a low-key, intimate touch, graceful but unvarnished and with a nose for honesty. The author ably captures this momentous time in American history, drawing the big picture with a practiced ease, particularly the military activities on the battlefield and the political maneuvering on the slavery question in the territories and in Washington. He also handles the more personal details related to Ewing and his children. His daughter married William Tecumseh Sherman (who was Ewing’s foster child, and whom he groomed to generalhood); his son Hugh was a free spirit (not to mention a general) who saved Sherman from charges of insanity; Charles was another war hero (and another general); and Thomas Jr. was yet another general, though he was besmirched by an early episode of ethnic cleansing (forced removal) of Southerners from Missouri.
As warm and enticing as an oral history, with lots more footnotes.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8147-7301-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
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 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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