National Public Radio producer Trudeau (The Last Citadel, 1991; Bloody Roads South, 1989), completing a fine trilogy of works about the Civil War, recounts the turbulent collapse of the Confederacy in the months following Lee's surrender at Appomattox Courthouse. ``General readers are so taken with the simple drama of Appomattox,'' Trudeau writes in his preface, ``that many continue to believe that the Civil War ended with that incident.'' Nothing could be farther from the truth, according to Trudeau: At the time of Lee's surrender, Confederate armies were still in the field in North Carolina, Alabama, and the trans-Mississippi, and it was far from obvious to the leaders of the North that the Confederacy would not continue to fight, even though the Richmond government had fled after the collapse of Lee's army. Trudeau reports events great and small in this three-month period in 1865 that transformed America: the final clashes and the surrender of the remaining Confederate armies, Lincoln's assassination, the capture of Jefferson Davis, the sinking of the steamboat Sultana in the Mississippi (heading north with over 1,500 former Union prisoners on board), and the tragic May 25 magazine explosion in Mobile, Alabama. The last actual battle between Union and Confederate forces was a skirmish at Palmito Ranch, Texas, on May 13; although it was not a resounding Union victory, the combatants themselves recognized that it represented the end of the war. Finally, Trudeau writes about the triumphant march of the Union armies in Washington on May 23, and the setting of the stage for Reconstruction. Superb and important—another ground-breaking achievement in research and narration for Trudeau, covering a period not often examined in depth by Civil War historians.
Pub Date: April 29, 1994
ISBN: 0-316-85328-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994
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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