First-rate research, first-rate synthesis. (28 b&w illustrations, 1 map; not seen)
A journalist and Revolutionary War historian examines in abundant and authoritative detail the reluctant city of New York as the colonies reeled toward revolution.
Ketchum (Saratoga: Turning Point of America’s Revolutionary War, 1997) begins with an account of the beauty of Manhattan and with the small city forming there (population 25,000 in 1774). When troubles began (taxes, taxes, taxes), the merchants, importers, shipping magnates, sailors, laborers—virtually all of them—were loyal to George III. No one wanted political independence. Ketchum notes that Robert Walpole’s policy of “salutary neglect” was one early factor in the emergence of a spirit of independence in New York (and elsewhere). The author examines the competitive political forces in the city (the Livingston and DeLancey factions) and shows how an increasing number and variety of taxes (molasses and sugar were among the first) created frustration and then rage among the city’s commercial men. But it was the Stamp Act (1765) that fomented the first open, pervasive opposition. Ketchum does a splendid job of explaining this act—its origins, its terms, its consequences—and of showing the myriad responses in the colonies, including meetings, demonstrations, resistances, and publications. Following hard upon it were the odious Quartering and Townshend Acts, which occasioned opposition that Ketchum correctly characterizes as “vociferous” and “immediate and widespread.” Ketchum’s focus is on New York, so we catch only glimpses of the Boston Massacre, of Concord (whose “shot heard round the world” we often hear, but not much else), and of Bunker Hill. But one of his principal accomplishments is to remind us that the origins of the revolution were economic, not political, and that the ultimate losers, the American Tories, were treated harshly before, during, and after the conflict. (Tarring and feathering and hanging were common.)
First-rate research, first-rate synthesis. (28 b&w illustrations, 1 map; not seen)Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2002
ISBN: 0-8050-6119-3
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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