Too much murky theorizing, and too many fanciful statements, spoil what could have been a workmanlike general history of the...
A thin attempt at revisionist history about the American Revolution, from a “British perspective.”
Drawing on George III's statement of his war aims for the Americans (“Just to punish them with a few bloody noses”), British journalist Harvey (Cochrane, 2000) sets out to correct what he regards as America's “myths” about its War of Independence. What follows is a rather conventional military history of the War, which commendably if rather one-sidedly includes the African-American, Native American, and Loyalist experience. But there are some over-the-top statements. Harvey (who, strangely for a self-proclaimed debunker of myth, seems to have accepted the Parson Weems “I cannot tell a lie” fable about George Washington as fact) unfairly depicts Washington as a master of ruthless gamesmanship. Somehow, he casts Thomas Conway, who conspired with Horatio Gates to depose Washington, as a Washington victim, while General Charles Lee, court-martialed at his own request after the Battle of Monmouth as a result of a well-documented act of insubordination, is painted as a casualty of Washington's malice. Harvey simply asserts that Washington “brazenly lied” when he denied using profanity at Lee, although neither Lee nor anyone else asserted at trial that Washington swore. Nonetheless, Harvey compares Lee's fate with those of men like Robespierre or Trotsky. There is more in this extraordinary vein: Samuel Adams was “America's Lenin,” the Constitutional Convention was a “counter-revolution” conducted by “conservatives,” the anti-Federalists were “radicals,” etc. Oddly, since the Second Continental Congress was made of up of many of the wealthiest men in America, Harvey concludes that the American Revolution constituted, “in Marxist terms, ‘bourgeois’ revolution, in which a newly emergent middle class rose against a dominant propertied class.” The author ends with a crude disparagement of Washington's personality—tough, stubborn, mean-tempered, harsh, ruthless, among other things—which, he cryptically contends, embodies “the spirit of America today.”
Too much murky theorizing, and too many fanciful statements, spoil what could have been a workmanlike general history of the war.Pub Date: June 15, 2002
ISBN: 1-58567-273-4
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
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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