A gem: well-written, engaging, and sure to make a significant contribution to the already voluminous Civil War literature.
A new collection of essays on the US Civil War, by many of the leading scholars in the field.
A typical problem with collections of essays is that they are often uneven in quality. Happily, there is no such inconsistency here. Among the best is Noah Andre Trudeau’s “The Walls of 1864,” which looks afresh at Grant’s campaigns in Northern Virginia by emphasizing the use of entrenchments and how they figured into the underestimated general’s keen understanding of modern warfare. Trudeau maintains that Grant realized, better than most generals of his day, that victory came from destroying the opposing army rather simply forcing it to retreat. Towards this end, defeats and victories in particular battles meant less than imposing a proportionally higher rate of casualties on your enemy than you yourself suffered. Grant was therefore willing to accept terrible losses, provided that Lee’s outnumbered army was being used up at a faster rate. In a good complement to Trudeau’s piece, Joseph T. Glatthaar further burnishes Grant’s reputation with his examination of the tactics he employed at Vicksburg, the victory that earned him his command in Virginia. However, the greatest charm of the anthology is its many treatments of less well-known events and personalities. Real Civil War buffs will be delighted by Stephen Sears’s exceptional piece on Lee’s famous “lost order,” which allowed McClellan to intercept the Confederate Army at Antietam. Likewise, Glenn W. LaFantasie’s essay on William C. Oates, the colonel who was defeated at Little Round Top, fills a lacuna in the literature on Gettysburg, while simultaneously providing a compelling human-interest story.
A gem: well-written, engaging, and sure to make a significant contribution to the already voluminous Civil War literature.Pub Date: June 4, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-14737-3
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
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
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