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BENTONVILLE

THE FINAL BATTLE OF SHERMAN AND JOHNSTON

A highly detailed history of a fierce encounter during General Sherman's march north in the spring of 1865. Hughes (History/Univ. of North Carolina) describes Sherman's tough, battle-seasoned veterans, pumped with victory and foraging off the land, as they moved through North Carolina to link up with General Grant in Virginia and corner General Lee and his decimated Army of Northern Virginia. Sherman's long march through the South had sapped the Confederacy's will to keep fighting and destroyed the resources they needed to do so. Overconfident, the Union forces walked into an ambush at Bentonville. General Joseph E. Johnston's adroit use of his outnumbered forces was successful at first; his surprise attacks through the swampy terrain along the Union army's flanks threatened at first to collapse their line, but the Confederates were eventually worn down by Sherman's counterattacks. Conspicuous bravery was commonplace. Soldiers in both armies, worn down by hunger and lack of sleep, sensing that the war was finally drawing to its close, kept fighting. The author gives brief biographies of leading officers and stories of enlisted men who dignified this desperate fight with their suffering and courage. In time both commanders realized that Johnston could not win and Sherman could not lose. Some rebels, realizing this, simply walked away and went home. Hughes provides a thorough account of this great (and bloody) tactical struggle between two skilled soldiers. Despite his fearsome reputation, Hughes shows, Sherman usually tried to avoid bloody battles and to preserve the lives of his men by strategic maneuvers, and he did so again, successfully, at Bentonville. A month later the war was over. This prodigiously researched book should stand for many years as the definitive account of one of the war's last battles. (9 maps)

Pub Date: Sept. 30, 1996

ISBN: 0-8078-2281-7

Page Count: 360

Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1996

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

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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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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