A narrative history of crucial Civil War operations in the West after Grant’s great victories at Vicksburg and Fort Donaldson in July 1863. Woodworth (History/Texas Christian Univ.) traces how several bloody campaigns, marked by serious blunders on both sides, helped seal the Confederacy’s fate. The Union Army of the Cumberland, under the command of General William S. Rosecrans, a neurotic, slow-moving perfectionist, were under orders to seize Chattanooga, a city important both because it served as a Confederate rail center (and the area around it was a breadbasket for Confederate forces) and because it guarded the path to Atlanta and the deep South. Opposing Rosecrans was Braxton Bragg, in charge of the Army of Tennessee. Bragg was particularly unpopular, and his command was frequently hamstrung by dissension. The opposing armies, maneuvering in an immense mountainous and forested area, were intermittently crippled by a lack of intelligence and by the difficulty of moving large numbers of troops over inhospitable terrain. Woodworth offers some convincing portraits of Rosecrans, Bragg, and their officers, and catches with great clarity the nature of the deadly chess game the armies were engaged in. Rosecrans’s errors led to a Union defeat at Chickamauga, costly for both sides, after which both armies were reinforced. General Longstreet joined Bragg, bringing elements of the Army of Northern Virginia, and deepening the professional jealousy that kept threatening to dissipate Confederate successes. Union forces were bolstered by the arrival of the armies of Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan, all talented, aggressive fighters. Pressured by Lincoln, the Union forces finally captured Chattanooga, inflicting another humiliating setback on the Confederates and opening up the path for Sherman’s march to Atlanta and the sea. A fine analysis of strategic and tactical operations, stressing the influence of commanders on the success, or failure, of their armies, while not losing sight of the grim experience of war for frontline troops. (4 photos, 6 maps, 5 engravings, not seen)
Pub Date: March 25, 1998
ISBN: 0-8032-4778-8
Page Count: 263
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1998
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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