A solid debut, well researched and delivered.
A capable imagining of American history’s bloodiest battle, punctuated by whizzing Minié balls, howling legions, and gloomy pronouncements by Lincoln and Lee.
Documentary filmmaker Croker—a son of the South, where traditionalists still call the horrible fight at Antietam Creek, Maryland, the Battle of Sharpsburg—strikes a fine balance between genre conventions (“he moved inexorably against the badly outnumbered but greatly determined Rebs”) and modern touches meant to humanize players since engraved and enshrined (George McClellan suffers from neuralgia, Clara Barton braves riding on a man’s saddle). Occasionally he channels a little overwritten period prose: “His face, already red from Virginia’s summer sun, now glowed with blood as he finally surrendered to his rage.” And, strange to say, he even surrenders himself to the Great Man school of history, such that his main characters rarely rank below field grade, while common soldiers largely serve as extras meant to be slain or at least mauled. Still, for the most part, Croker delivers a tale that would do a Bruce Catton or Shelby Steele proud. He is conscious of the myriad historical accidents that went into two great armies’ not-so-chance encounter not so far from Washington, conscious of the shades of meaning over which contemporary historians are now arguing. On the latter score, Croker does a credible job of exploring the depths of Northern resistance to Lincoln’s call for the emancipation of Southern slaves; late in the narrative, Lincoln—who is as besieged as any general in the field—quashes a small rebellion in the making after hearing two midlevel officers discuss the wisdom of negotiating a peace by allowing slavery to endure, even as poor headache-plagued George McClellan threatens mutiny before a much larger audience. (“I wish to make an example,” Lincoln intones, and so he does.) For all the political intrigue and human-interest background, however, there’s plenty of mayhem for those who like their historical fiction awash in blood, as Croker’s surely is.
A solid debut, well researched and delivered.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-055908-X
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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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