An approach that will appeal mostly to readers of military history.
Woodworth (History/Texas Christian Univ.; Sherman: Lessons in Leadership, 2009, etc.) examines the political and military conflicts that accompanied the westward flow in the 1840s and exacerbated hostilities between the North and South.
Although the author’s thesis is principally political, he focuses mostly on the military struggles of the time. Myriad pages and maps deal with specific battles, chronicling participants, locale, strategies, tactics, failures, victories and casualty figures. At times the thesis struggles to emerge from beneath the bodies of fallen combatants, but Woodworth certainly knows the territory. He begins with the presidency of Martin Van Buren, who was greeted almost immediately by the Panic of 1837 and the incipient stages of abolitionism. The author summarizes the brief presidency of William Henry Harrison, with solid analysis of the ludicrous “Log Cabin campaign”—was this the first American election when image trumped all else? He also looks at the John Tyler administration, the rise of the abolitionists, the migrations to Oregon and California and the story of Joseph Smith (Woodworth barely restrains his disdain for Smith’s religious claims). When Texas enters the narrative as a military and political issue, the battle scenes commence and do not conclude until the end of the Mexican War. Occasionally, Woodworth switches from one battlefield to another, moving from the deserts of Mexico to the halls of Congress, where we follow the increasingly hostile debates between advocates of free and slave states, including Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and other era notables. Following a discussion of the Gold Rush of 1849 and the Wilmot Proviso, the author describes the negotiations and personalities that made possible the Compromise of 1850, a measure that stalled the Civil War but did not stop it.
An approach that will appeal mostly to readers of military history.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-26524-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2010
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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