Contrarian and well-written—a welcome remedy to Parson Weems–ish tales of the past.
An iconoclastic, provocative study of the Revolutionary War that invalidates a few chestnuts—including the one that the surrendering British played “The World Turned Upside Down” at Yorktown.
“There is no hard evidence,” writes former Military Book Club editor Stephenson (ed., Battlegrounds: Geography and Art of Warfare, 2003), that the British played anything other than a slow march, befitting the mournful occasion. There is plenty of evidence, though, that the war was a tough business for all concerned. Proceeding cautiously, Stephenson makes a case that will induce teeth-gnashing on the right-wing talk-show circuit, namely that, inasmuch as “colonial wars share a certain geometry,” it is not beyond the pale to liken the rebel colonial struggle in America to nationalist insurgencies in places such as Vietnam and Iraq, where American soldiers now take the place of the imperialist lobsterbacks of old. (In case the point is lost, Stephenson notes that George Bush is more George III than George Washington.) Whatever the parallels, Stephenson observes that an army with a home-field advantage has vastly better odds of survival than one in a different country and culture; moreover, it is part of that geometry that militias will take it as a priority to crush loyalism, wherever it might be encountered. In the American colonies, this meant civil war on several fronts, though the loyalists were at their strongest in New York and New Jersey, one reason the British tried so hard to center the war there, where they could count on the help of friends. After examining such matters as the lives of officers, who had it easier than the enlisted men if only because they could resign without being hanged or beheaded as deserters, and the musket-and-mutton material world of the soldiery, Stephenson turns to more familiar ground, analyzing the war’s most important battles and sometimes, as with Trenton, musing about why things didn’t work out disastrously for the American cause.
Contrarian and well-written—a welcome remedy to Parson Weems–ish tales of the past.Pub Date: April 3, 2007
ISBN: 0-06-073261-X
Page Count: 448
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2007
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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