A revealing study of the global dimensions of America’s war for independence.
History of the American Revolution as it played out in other theaters around the world.
“The American Revolutionary War was in fact a Russian doll of a war, with wars nested in other wars, far beyond the thirteen colonies,” writes Johns Hopkins history professor Pearsall. Indeed, she notes, Britain’s colonies in North America included 13 others besides the 13 that would rebel—and it’s a matter of some curiosity that while there were plenty of stirrings, those other 13 remained under the British aegis. Some of the extraterritorial rebellions that figure in Pearsall’s account are those mounted by Indigenous peoples west of the Appalachians, who had stronger ideas about liberty, as one British observer noted, than any other “people on the face of the earth.” That demand for liberty was well matched elsewhere in the world, when another revolutionary war broke out in India, one that “ended in a stalemate in 1784.” Bernardo de Gálvez, a renowned Spanish soldier and Apache fighter, helped divert British resources in Florida; French and Spanish forces did the same at Gibraltar, tying down a garrison and war matériel that might otherwise have been sent to the American colonies; French fleets made a failed attempt to invade Jamaica, but all the same kept the British defenders busy. Pearsall’s narrative extends even to China, with American traders making the case for an extension of credit that Alexander Hamilton would run with. Pearsall herself does good work in chronicling that “a revolutionary spirit was alive across the British Empire,” one that accused the empire’s leaders of being enslavers—and that would play out in later abolitionist movements. Less smoothly integrated into the narrative, but provocative, is her suggestion that the revolutionary spirit inspired colonial women to practice birth control “because these revolutions unleashed a sense that women, too, should be able to pursue life, liberty, and happiness.”
A revealing study of the global dimensions of America’s war for independence.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9780385548717
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
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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