A sharp-edged argument for de-commemorating traitors.
Well-crafted portraits of the heroes whose names recently replaced those of Confederates on numerous military installations.
Seidule, a retired general and emeritus West Point history professor, could not present stronger credentials to serve on a congressional commission to replace the names of Confederates on Southern military bases—Hood, Bragg, Benning, Lee, the list goes on—with those of true heroes. “Confederates, Congress emphatically declared, deserved no place among our military commemorations,” he writes. “The votes came from all parts of the country and all areas of the political spectrum.” Of the bases he highlights, three were named for Confederates who never served in the U.S. military, and three for incompetent officers who wouldn’t deserve the honor even if they were loyalists; another three, competent in warcraft, “used it to kill more US soldiers than any other enemy commanders ever have.” The Naming Commission found far more appropriate military personnel to honor: Fort Pickett, Virginia, formerly commemorating the feckless Gettysburg veteran, was renamed Fort Barfoot, honoring a Virginian who won the Medal of Honor in World War II; Fort Rucker, Alabama, named for a comrade of KKK founder Nathan Bedford Forrest, was renamed Fort Novosel for “an iconic army aviator” who flew 2,000 missions in Vietnam; Fort Benning, Georgia, named for an “ardent secessionist,” took the names of Hal and Julie Moore, the Vietnam hero and his wife, who “forced the hidebound army to take responsibility for casualty notification.” The renaming project met some initial resistance, Seidule allows, but most within the military and in local communities embraced the changes. One of Donald Trump’s earliest moves as president in 2025 was to order a reversion to the bases’ former names, though ostensibly to honor soldiers who just happened to share the names of those Confederates. “He chose surnames over service, stripping honors from ten true American heroes in the process,” writes Seidule. “Trump’s 2025 name switch does disservice to all those who serve.”
A sharp-edged argument for de-commemorating traitors.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781250330284
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
