The first of three volumes- and this one five years in the writing- this bids fair to be a definitive history within the limitations. Shelby Foote has apparently set himself. A novelist, he has viewed the facts exhaustively, through primary sources, contemporary writing and the recreation of the most gifted of the historians and biographers. Quite evidently, it is war as it was manipulated by the men in key positions, for almost consistently one sees action as he sees it through the generals and their lieutenants. There is little here of cause and effect. The telling starts with the two political and ideological leaders:-Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln; and with the contretemps which precipitated the firing on Fort Sumter. Nothing is here of the years of tension and the factors that went into the making of war. Nor- throughout the crowded first two years- is there anything more than passing mention of the repercussions on the citizens above and below the line. He has taken the men; he has followed the tortuous pattern of war, throughout its sprawling lines, war on land and war on water; he has recounted the battles, distilling the essence by the novelist's creative processes, seeking, he says, as a novelist the same truth sought by the historian. Because of these limitations of substance and handling, this cannot be a definitive history without statement of the boundaries. Furthermore, while one concedes an extraordinary objectivity in view of his background as a Mississippian, his gift for respecting the opponent worthy of his steel, he is unfortunately all too ready, it seems, to accept and lay stress on such rumors and canards as, for instance, Grant's alcoholism and anti-Semitism, and some of the less palatable aspects of Lincoln's personality and shortcomings. But he cuts some of the glamour away from some of the Southern heroes, too. This first volume, ending as it does shortly after the Emancipation Proclamation, leaves the reader aware that while history writes the South's defeat, the first two years wrote a balance of victory — with the writing on the wall only faintly decipherable.
Pub Date: Nov. 14, 1958
ISBN: 0394746236
Page Count: 866
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1958
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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