An unusual and affecting take on the American colonies at the precipice.
A first-time author tracks the 1775 hurricane that pummeled America’s Eastern seaboard, echoing the patriotic storm in the colonies.
After forming over Africa’s west coast, the Hurricane of Independence touched down on September 1 in New Bern, N.C., where it killed 200, and then proceeded to Norfolk, Williamsburg, Annapolis, Philadelphia, Newport and, having morphed into merely a violent rainstorm, on to New York City and Boston. Sometime around September 10 a second tempest (erroneously thought to be the tail end of the first hurricane) roared ashore in Newfoundland, killing thousands and devastating seaside communities and the British cod industry. Williams dubs this the “Codfishermen’s Hurricane,” and he uses the progress of both storms to examine the developments in the various colonial regions on the eve of the Revolution: the evenly divided Patriot/Tory town of Norfolk’s fear of a British-inspired slave rebellion, the hurricane’s destruction of the Annapolis statehouse dome, the drenching of the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, Washington’s assumption of command of the Continental Army in Boston. But for the facts of the hurricanes themselves, Williams offers little new for even casual students of the Revolution, but he charmingly uses the hurricane as a window through which to view the psychology of the Enlightenment; the beginning of scientific inquiry and the demystification of popular superstition, captured in the persons of wealthy Virginia planter and amateur scientist Landon Carter, future Yale president Ezra Stiles and, of course, Benjamin Franklin; and the lingering suspicions among most that the hurricane reflected heaven’s judgment on the political upheaval. But what was God saying? Was the tempest a punishment against the tyrannical master or a rebuke to the rebellious subjects? In agreeable prose, Williams recovers the victims’ speculation on the hurricane’s meaning and its almost poetic commingling of the natural and moral worlds.
An unusual and affecting take on the American colonies at the precipice.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4022-1228-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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