A passionately presented book full of intriguing revelations.
A spirited portrait of life during the American Revolution from the perspective of the British army, with a particular focus on a regiment known as the Royal Welch Fusiliers.
The courageous yet ultimately doomed 18th-century campaign to prevent American independence is rendered in lavish detail by Urban (Wellington’s Rifles: Six Years to Waterloo with England's Legendary Sharpshooters, 2004, etc.). The author focuses primarily on the troops of the red-coated 23rd Regiment, aka the Royal Welch Fusiliers. Significant historical documentation has surfaced on the activities of the soldiers of the 23rd, and Urban draws on some colorful and often surprisingly candid written reminisces from its members. Urban begins by pointing toward officers who were so desperate to escape the battle that they leapt to their deaths in the sea as their ship set sail for America. The author moves on to fill in the gaps around the recollections of figures such as Sgt. Roger Lamb, Lt. John Lenthall, officer Harry Calvert and dozens of letters, heretofore unpublished, from soldiers caught in the heat of battle. The clashes with the American troops are well-documented by Urban’s vigorous prose, which often leaves little to the imagination. The most interesting sections are culled from the records of the internal workings of the regiment. These include a detailed examination of the dress regulations; a look at how raw some of the recruits were; a few passages on desertion (usually punishable by execution) and spies (whose heads were impaled on stakes by overzealous colonels); and notes from soldiers who found happiness in the army, such as the man who was glad that he got to “save a good deal of money.” Urban’s comprehensive and engrossing account concludes with details on the fates of remaining British soldiers after they surrendered, and how some even refused to believe they had been beaten.
A passionately presented book full of intriguing revelations.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8027-1647-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2007
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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