History as page-turner: a fascinating inquest.
Ulysses S. Grant was supposed to be in attendance that fateful night at Ford’s Theatre. He managed to be absent. Hmm . . .
Conspiracy-minded readers raised on Oliver Stone and Art Bell might have a field day with Grant’s absence. Lincoln-assassination scholar Kauffman doesn’t enter Grant into the suspects’ gallery, but he makes clear that the killing of the president was far from the work of a lone gunman: on the night of April 14, 1865, when Lincoln was killed, his secretary of state was attacked at his home nearby, and “investigation revealed that other men had also been targeted: the vice president, secretary of war, and general in chief of the army.” Add rumors of insurrectionist plots to bomb ports and ships at sea and to poison New York’s water supply, and you have all the makings of a terrorist scare that wouldn’t be out of place today. Underemployed actor John Wilkes Booth was, of course, central to the plot; as Kauffman writes, when he began this work he was inclined to think of the killer as “a tragic figure, torn between competing ideals and led by hubris and emotion to commit one of history’s greatest blunders,” but he ended up sure that Booth “was a manipulator, not a pawn.” So winning was Booth that he managed to steer secret agents, secessionist sympathizers, and even a few shadowy northerners into a long-nursed plot that evolved from kidnapping the president to doing away with him, period. Kauffman turns up some interesting suspects and fellow travelers, and he complicates an already complex plot by unveiling the workings of a war profiteering ring that involved Confederate officials’ infiltrating a “cotton and tobacco trade that had been going on with the Lincoln administration’s blessing,” which “was supposed to stimulate the Northern economy while encouraging Southern planters and merchants to reestablish their ties to the Union.” The plot thickens, and by the point that Booth and accomplices escape easily from a Washington supposedly under martial law, the reader will gasp at the abundance of villains and the extent of their crimes.
History as page-turner: a fascinating inquest.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-50785-X
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
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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