Essential for students of the Revolutionary era and a pleasure for cartography buffs.
The story of the American Revolution capably told through maps.
If it can’t be measured, the engineers say, it can’t be monitored. Just so, without knowledge of where an empire begins and ends, there can be no empire: thus maps, those indispensable adjuncts of nations. Brown, vice-chairman of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library, and map dealer and historian Cohen (Mapping the West: America's Westward Movement 1524-1890, 2002, etc.) chart the seven years of Revolutionary War between Britain and its North American Colonies in a series of maps and related illustrations. The earliest major piece, the “Anti-Gallican Map,” sets the stage two decades before the Revolution, when Britain and France contested over the territory. As the authors write, meaningfully, “cartography always benefits from war or even the prospect of war,” and the multicolored map from December 1755, “a masterpiece of propaganda,” made a case for the necessity of war by depicting British North America as a civilized island in an ocean of French marauders and their savage Indian allies. The war with France over, maps then looked into the interior of the continent, where land-hungry Americans longed to go but the British crown locked away. If some of the maps are aspirational, most are highly realistic (or, as the authors put it, “candid”); the map of Boston showing the disposition of British troops at the time of what would become the Battle of Bunker Hill is a marvel of economic truth-telling. The excellent supporting artwork and Brown and Cohen’s elegant text help place these works in perspective in terms of both the development of the war from Fort Duquesne to Yorktown and the rise of modern mapmaking through the persons of unwitting heroes like Col. John Montresor, “the most able British soldier who served during the French and Indian War and the American Revolution.”
Essential for students of the Revolutionary era and a pleasure for cartography buffs.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-06032-4
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 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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