Next book

A STRUGGLE FOR POWER

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

In a compellingly argued review of events leading to the 1775 clash at Lexington and Concord, historian Draper (A Very Thin Line, 1991, etc.) contends that the American Revolution was not an ideological battle between democracy and monarchy; it was rather a pure struggle for power on the part of colonies that had experienced a significant but incomplete degree of economic and political self-determination. Deftly tracing the history of the English colonies in America, Draper asserts that British absorption of Canada (1760) and the consequent disappearance of the French threat to the Americans fatally weakened the tenuous ties that bound the colonies to the mother country. Moreover, perceptive thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic had long observed that the British economy needed the prosperous colonies (as sources of raw materials and as markets for British manufactures) far more than the Americans needed Britain. The Stamp Act, the Intolerable Acts, and British attempts to enforce the long-neglected Molasses Act invariably incurred resistance among colonists long accustomed to loose British reins. While by any contemporary measure British rule of the colonies was benevolent and enlightened, Draper argues that any British course of action would have met resistance, as colonists, tasting a heady mixture of liberty and prosperity, successively rejected British attempts to regulate their internal affairs, proposals for American representation in Parliament, and suggested links to the king independent of Parliament. For the British, supine acceptance of increasingly strident colonial demands was out of the question: Retention of the colonies was regarded as essential to Britain's standing as a great power. But, as Draper points out, by allowing the colonial leadership to unify and by not taking their resistance seriously enough from the outset, Britain lost the war before it had even started. A skillfully told, first-rate examination of the economic and political circumstances that made the American Revolution unavoidable.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-8129-2575-0

Page Count: 608

Publisher: Times/Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 17


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2017


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • IndieBound Bestseller


  • National Book Award Finalist

Next book

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 17


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2017


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • IndieBound Bestseller


  • National Book Award Finalist

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

Next book

NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

Close Quickview