A solid first book in which impressive documentation undergirds an ambitious assertion.
In his debut, Wisconsin-based historian Coss examines the Colonial smallpox epidemic and how it influenced the forging of American identity and politics.
The outbreak of smallpox in Boston in 1721, though long overdue, caused panic and coverup, as reported in this compelling though slightly overlong narrative. The HMS Seahorse was certainly carrying smallpox-infested passengers from England when shipmates were allowed to shuttle into Boston in April, spreading the virus around town and causing outbreak by May. The eminent minister Cotton Mather, undergoing personal crises at this point (even though the trauma of the Salem witch trials were 30 years behind him) and still determined to continue progress in the community through his effective leadership, grasped the efficacy of inoculation through Royal Society articles and began to promote it. Meanwhile, a crusading Boston physician and apothecary, Zabdiel Boylston, resolved to attempt the inoculation procedure, using his own son and slave as patients, in defiance of the town meeting that condemned the procedure. (Inoculation had already been undertaken in London.) James Franklin (Benjamin’s older brother), the Boston publisher of the New-England Courant, first attacked the cause of inoculation and let the public controversy within his pages fuel his circulation. All these public-health events foamed around the ongoing resentment of the vilified governor, Samuel Shute, who was battling for supremacy in the Massachusetts House. Franklin’s “taunting and belligerent” Courant offered outrageous editorial commentary on a running dispute over official reaction to meeting Native-American aggression, and the publisher was jailed as a result. Coss valiantly weaves these threads together, though these are only some of the many roiling disputes of the day; in the end, the convergence entailing Franklin’s Courant seems somewhat forced. Nonetheless, Coss offers a fascinating glimpse inside the Boston mindset of the era.
A solid first book in which impressive documentation undergirds an ambitious assertion.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-8308-6
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
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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