by Munro Price ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2014
A useful addition to Napoleonic history, but readers well versed in that history will follow the battles and diplomatic...
An exploration of the years between Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and his exile to Elbe.
As Price (Modern European History/Bradford Univ.; The Perilous Crown: France Between Revolutions, 1814-1848, 2007, etc.) demonstrates, Waterloo was no more than an anticlimax to Napoleon’s career; it really ended when he left for Elbe. Ultimately, he was undone by confusing troop movements, too many generals leading lots of different armies and a complex assortment of politicians, czars, kings and other leaders. Just about everyone in Europe was involved in trying to defeat Napoleon after his Russian debacle. The author clearly examines their varied objectives, from the restoration of the Bourbons to installation of a puppet government to regency led by Marie Louise, Napoleon’s wife and the daughter of the Austrian leader, Francis II. Some readers will have difficulty deciphering the maps, following the numerous different armies in battles and recognizing the constantly changing players—the biggest of which was Klemens von Metternich, who offered mediation after the Russian retreat. Price questions his motives, wondering whether he truly wanted peace or was laying a trap for Napoleon, who feared succumbing to a dishonorable peace, which he felt would cause the French to rise in revolt. His bête noire was being attacked by the mobs of Paris, and he famously said of public opinion, it “is an invisible, mysterious power that nothing can resist; nothing could be more changeable…but it never lies.” Napoleon’s frequent reports from Paris were expressly designed to keep tabs on opinion, but he often failed to listen. Taxation, conscription, censorship and the collapse of trade turned the people against him.
A useful addition to Napoleonic history, but readers well versed in that history will follow the battles and diplomatic machinations better than those with a narrower scope of historical and geographical knowledge.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-19-993467-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
HISTORY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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 Yorker staff 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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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