An ably edited collection of letters revealing life on the Civil War home front. Using correspondence handed down through her father's family, Berry reconstructs the lives of Kentucky politician Brutus J. Clay and his circle of friends and relatives. ``Reading those letters,'' she writes, ``was like walking through the door of a nineteenth-century drawing room and sitting down among its inhabitants busily gossiping about their neighbors, exchanging recipes, and musing about politics.'' The conversational quality is a very real strength of this collection. Berry charts the course of Clay's rise to political prominence, his growth from householder to statesman. She also comments wisely on the culture of the time, a culture in which slaveholders referred to ``our negroes'' and worried about being poisoned by ill-treated kitchen hands seeking revenge, in which scarlet fever and cholera were too common visitors, in which a farmer's perennial worry about floods and drought alternated with concern about whether Kansas was to enter the Union as a free or slave state. Berry's explications of the contents of the letters are helpful, although she sometimes strives too hard for effect. Throughout the pages of this absorbing book, Clay remains a stern yet moderate presence, questioning whether it might be possible to chart a middle course, a ``middle confederacy'' of the border states in order better to separate North from South. Loyal to the Union cause but sympathetic to the rebels, Clay reveals in his letters little-known aspects of Civil War politics, notably a Chicago convention of so-called Union Democrats, called to find ways to defeat the sitting president at the polls. Clay, as Berry notes, ``denounced President Lincoln for using extreme methods to prosecute the war.'' This volume will be of considerable interest to students of the Civil War. (32 pages b&w photos and maps, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-55970-342-3
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1996
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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