The true value of this book is Jamieson’s in-depth portrayal of the armies and their leaders, heroes and fools as they...
The last few months of the Civil War demonstrate just how much it was a “lost cause” for the South. In the latest installment of the Great Campaigns of the Civil War series, Air Force senior historian emeritus Jamieson (Khobar Towers: Tragedy and Response, 2008, etc.) recounts the last battles, skirmishes and attempts at peace.
Ulysses S. Grant, a man who never backed down from a fight, commanded the Northern army, and his second-in-command was just as fierce: William Tecumseh Sherman, whose war of destruction starved the Confederate army of supplies, ammunition and food. The Northern army had the necessary supplies and the transport to deliver them where they were required. They had a ready supply of men to fight, as well, something the South sorely lacked. Gen. Joseph Johnston, unable to concentrate enough forces to defeat Sherman, could only check him at the battle of Bentonville; he had no way to hold ground. Jamieson devotes much of the book to the continuing campaign to take Petersburg and Richmond, a fight that lasted more than nine months and featured multiple offenses by both sides. There were two separate attempts to broker a peace agreement, but in the end, Jefferson Davis asked for peace between the two countries while Abraham Lincoln insisted there could only be one common country. Ultimately, it was almost a month after Appomattox that the last Confederate forces surrendered. The author describes each of the battles fought in early 1865 in extensive detail. Civil War aficionados will no doubt relish the descriptions of the officers, troop movements and tactics in each campaign, but the narrative may bog down for average readers.
The true value of this book is Jamieson’s in-depth portrayal of the armies and their leaders, heroes and fools as they struggled to the bitter end.Pub Date: April 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8032-2581-7
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
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 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
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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