The first full-length history of this epic Civil War battle in two decades delivers Homeric gore minus the sweep and poetry. Granted, Daniel (History/Murray State Univ.) isn't trying to be Homer. His densely annotated study is a solid, even remarkable piece of scholarly reconstruction that stresses historical preciseness over drama, right down to its frequent, often clinical descriptions of wounds. The human dimension of the first large-scale slaughter of Americans by Americans remains strangely and unfortunately muted, buried beneath an avalanche of facts and figures documenting troop strength and tactical maneuvers. Telling details, like a rebel soldier's recollection of shivering in his tent on the eve of battle as a band played ``Home Sweet Home'' in the nearby Union camp, are too few and far between. Daniel's explication of the egotism, self-interest, and insecurity that hindered the judgment of both Union and Confederate commanders and the politics that guided staffing and strategy textures the blow-by-blow tactical commentary with some human interest. The inclusion of so many minor figures, while confusing, also shorts in-depth analyses of major players like Union general Ulysses Grant, who remains remote. Daniel's major accomplishment is that he effectively dramatizes the chaos of war—the traffic jams, bungled orders, and terror-stricken confusion that constitute the ragged improvisation of battle. But Daniel too often fails to rise above that chaos, miring the reader in it as well. Stepping back more frequently to add analyses to the description would provide badly needed perspective and scope, making the account more accessible to novices who don't know a regiment from a brigade. Though he purports to settle differences among historians, Daniel's tone is closer to mediation than finality. Exhaustive but workmanlike, this will be of interest to academics and hard-core Civil War buffs. (maps, photos, not seen) (Book-of-the-Month Club/History Book Club selection)
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-80375-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1997
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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