A lively, well-written exploration of a little-known chapter of American history peopled with fascinating characters.
Historical excavation of the members of Napoleon’s inner circle who fled to America following the collapse of his regime.
Former attorney and U.S. diplomat Crocker takes up the story in 1815, shortly after Waterloo. Fleeing the victorious British and Prussian armies, Napoleon reached the vicinity of Bordeaux. There, with the help of Consul William Lee, he hoped to escape to America, where he “envisioned a new, private life.” Ultimately, he decided to surrender to the British, but many of his officers and other associates sailed to the U.S. Several members of that group, including Napoleon’s brother Joseph, settled near Philadelphia. Crocker describes their careers and the fates of some of their longer-range projects: A wine- and olive-growing community in Alabama failed due to inhospitable climate, as did an attempt to colonize a stretch of Texas. A proposal to install Joseph as king of one of the Spanish colonies, possibly Mexico, drew strong opposition because it “would have upset the delicate relations between the United States and Spain and would have had profound reverberations in England and France as well.” In the final chapters, Crocker looks at the career of P.S. Ney, a North Carolina schoolteacher who was believed by many who met him to be Marshal Ney, one of Napoleon’s generals. The author arrays the evidence for and against the supposition, mainly in the form of reminiscences of Ney’s former students 40 to 50 years afterward. The key issues are whether Marshal Ney’s execution in France could have been faked; whether the descriptions of the two men are different enough that they could not be the same person; and whether there is any record of P.S. Ney’s independent existence prior to his appearance in America. Crocker leans toward the conclusion that the two are different, but he concedes that there remains room for doubt.
A lively, well-written exploration of a little-known chapter of American history peopled with fascinating characters.Pub Date: March 15, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63388-654-4
Page Count: 488
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
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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