Another colorful, absorbing historical narrative from Leckie (George Washington's War, 1992, etc.), who tells here of the territorial growth of America, as well as of the country's various wars with enemies foreign and domestic, from the early Federal period through the war with Mexico. The history Leckie relates is one of constant warfare. He begins with a lively account of the Yorktown surrender and then proceeds through America's quasi-war with France and its brief, gloriously triumphant conflict with the Barbary pirates on through the War of 1812, the Indian wars, the Texan War of Independence, and war with Mexico. Through anecdotal accounts, Leckie emphasizes the human interest in these battles, drawing distinctive portraits of Edward Preble, commodore of the Barbary expedition; Zachary Taylor; Andrew Jackson; William Henry Harrison; the Indian chief Tecumseh; Winfield Scott, and other military leaders. The author adheres only very loosely to his theme of American expansion: He says little about the Louisiana Purchase, for instance, while devoting a great deal of space to the Barbary War—in which expansion was not an issue—and to the War of 1812, in which American plans to conquer territory were unsuccessful. In telling of the rout by American forces of the Mexican army in the ``halls of Montezuma,'' and of the 1848 treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo—which ceded northern Mexican territories to the US—Leckie doesn't try to ennoble American actions, characterizing the war with Mexico as one of the ``great land grabs in human history that have remained permanent''—one after which, ``except for Alaska, the area of the continental United States was now rounded out.'' Here, as in his earlier works, Leckie offers little that's new or profound, and no penetrating historical analysis—but, once again, he delivers a vivid, engrossing story. (Maps)
Pub Date: Nov. 30, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-016802-1
Page Count: 704
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1993
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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