Whitman once said that the real history of the Civil War would never be written. Nonetheless, in his riveting accounts, Wheeler (Lee's Terrible Swift Sword, 1992, etc.) seems to come close to capturing the war as experienced by its contemporaries. Here, he covers the conflict's surrealistic, turbulent beginning and first battle. Using contemporary diaries, newspapers, speeches, and articles, Wheeler captures the gradual development of the crisis between North and South over the half-century before the war: the naivetÇ, euphoria, and idealism of the 1860 campaign; the stirring secessions of South Carolina and other states as the Buchanan Administration sat paralyzed in Washington; the contempt that greeted Lincoln's arrival in Washington; and the amateurish military exploits of the war's early months. The images that emerge from these first-person accounts linger: a dazed Buchanan, hearing at a friend's wedding that South Carolina has seceded, collapsing in a chair and abruptly leaving; the wife of the Fort Sumter commander crossing an armed harbor to be with her husband; the thin, awkward figure of Stonewall Jackson, dressed as a private soldier, swaying from side to side in his saddle as he rides into battle; and the abolitionist Theodore Winthrop falling while leading his men in a suicidal charge at Big Bethel, the first substantial skirmish of the war. Even the ignominious rout of Union soldiers after Jackson's surprise charge won the confused Battle of First Bull Run didn't seem to make Americans realize that the war was going to be a costly business (civilians had gone out in carriages to view the battle). Wheeler ends with the retreat after Bull Run—it wasn't until the following year, with the Seven Days, Shiloh, and Antietam, that Americans both North and South realized that the rebellion was going to be not a quick, colorful game but a grim, grueling horror. A valuable addition to Civil War literature, both scholarly and popular. (120 photos)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-016992-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1993
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 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
