A rousing and robust story about the immortal charge and the significant role played in the war by Theodore Roosevelt, the...
One of the “iconic moments in American history” is scrutinized in heroic detail.
Gardner’s books previously took on such iconic figures as Jesse James (Shot All to Hell: Jesse James, the Northfield Raid, and the Wild West’s Greatest Escape, 2014, etc.), Pat Garrett, and Billy the Kid. He writes that Theodore Roosevelt believed Spain was an Old World, “weak and decadent” relic, its occupation of Cuba outrageous. Roosevelt was assistant secretary of the Navy when the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898. Ambitious, intense, and energetic, he had been aching to be in a war—“nothing was going to keep him from the battlefield.” He resigned his position and a month later was off to Texas to join the First United States Volunteer Calvary as second in command, a 38-year-old lieutenant colonel. The Rough Riders, as newspapers called them, were a “ragtag regiment of Southwestern cowpunchers, Oklahoma Indians, Ivy League football stars, and champion polo players.” Roosevelt loved it: “I put myself in the way of things happening, and they happened.” They arrived by boat at Santiago in June. After experiencing some action, the penultimate event took place on July 1. Roosevelt, astride his horse, Little Texas, led his men up the hill yelling “Forward, March!” bullets from the Spanish soldiers’ rifles whistling by. One soldier wrote home: “I really believe firmly now, that they cannot kill him.” They took the hill but suffered casualties. The “splendid little war” lasted 10 weeks, and Roosevelt was elected governor of New York a year later. Numerous quotes from letters, journals, and memoirs bring this adventurous story to life. There are many books about this event, including Roosevelt’s own. Gardner’s short-paragraphed, fast-paced, and thoroughly researched addition will appeal to teens as well.
A rousing and robust story about the immortal charge and the significant role played in the war by Theodore Roosevelt, the only American president to be awarded the Medal of Honor.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-231208-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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