A highly readable and insightful account of Sherman's infamous march to the sea. Kennett (History/Univ. of Georgia; G.I.: The American Soldier in World War II, 1987) provides a ground-level view of the ``March through Georgia'' and the events leading up to it. After his appointment as commander of all Union forces in 1864, Ulysses S. Grant consulted with his friend William Tecumseh Sherman, whom he had chosen to spearhead the invasion of Georgia. In May of that year, leading an army of 100,000, Sherman launched the offensive. Atlanta fell on September 1, and the Federal force began its slash- and-burn march to the sea, culminating with the capture of Savannah four days before Christmas. Though he often puts the reader at the side of the generals, revealing their innermost thoughts, Kennett is less concerned with grand strategy and tactics than with the campaign's effects on ordinary people: the residents of Georgia and common soldiers on both sides. Based largely on letters, diaries, memoirs, and contemporary newspaper accounts, the book achieves its goal. How many other such volumes would discuss, for instance, the rampant wartime inflation that caused eggs to sell for $3.00 a dozen when the simple soldier earned only $11.00 a month? Or that a quartermaster in Atlanta informed of Sherman's orders for evacuation of that city replied, ``Tell Cump Sherman for me that this order won't read well in history''? The author also treats readers to vivid character sketches: Sherman, a racist who believed slavery would endure and who admired the Southern fighting spirit but fought for the survival of the Union; and Joe Brown, the governor of Georgia, who liked to lecture Jefferson Davis on policy and reveled in his title of commander in chief of his state's army and navy. Well researched and compelling, appealing to buffs but with enough social history to interest the casual reader as well.
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-016815-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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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