by Louis P. Masur ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2015
A concise, useful analysis of Lincoln’s generous hope for postwar America, seen against the failures of the actual...
Historian Masur (American Studies/Rutgers Univ.; The Civil War: A Concise History, 2011, etc.) explores Abraham Lincoln’s views on national reconciliation.
On April 11, 1865, shortly after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox—and just three days before his own assassination—Lincoln gave his final speech, to thousands (including John Wilkes Booth) gathered on a mud-filled White House lawn. “We meet this evening, not in sorrow, but in gladness of heart,” he said. But rather than deliver the expected victory speech after many years of civil war, Lincoln talked about Reconstruction, by which he meant “the re-inauguration of the national authority.” As Masur explains, Lincoln had refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of secession. Throughout the war, he viewed the Confederacy as the “so-called” seceded states and worked to re-establish the authority of the federal government. As outlined in his 1863 Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, he intended to offer a full pardon to participants in the rebellion and to make emancipation a key part of national healing. Masur uses Lincoln’s final speech as a lens through which to recount the ongoing national debate over the reunification of North and South. In newspapers and speeches, many asked, were the seceded states still within the Union or out? Had they forfeited their rights? Should they be treated as conquered provinces? Determined to end the war and restore peace, Lincoln had been working since 1862 to re-establish national authority by appointing military governors after Union military victories in several states, including Tennessee, North Carolina, Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas. The author details these efforts and the extent to which Lincoln publicized his reconciliation intentions through widely distributed handbills. “Lincoln not only sought justice,” writes Masur, “he also desired mercy.”
A concise, useful analysis of Lincoln’s generous hope for postwar America, seen against the failures of the actual Reconstruction that followed.Pub Date: April 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-19-021839-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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