A solid performance, though, placing key events in a larger perspective without playing down the vast stupidity of many of...
Western historian Borneman (Alaska, 2003, etc.) argues that the war of 1812, often dismissed as a sideshow to European events, had a profound impact on US history.
He begins by examining the conflict’s origins. The English practice of impressing seamen from American vessels was the most widely cited casus belli at the time (and the one most of us read about in high-school history class). Equally important was the outspoken desire of many Westerners, including Andrew Jackson and William Henry Harrison, to annex more territory, including as much of Canada as the US could grab. Much of the war was fought on the Canadian front, including several key naval battles on the Great Lakes. When invading US troops burned the Canadian city of York (later renamed Toronto), the English—temporarily free from the threat of Napoleon—retaliated by burning Washington and bombarding Baltimore’s Fort McHenry before retiring. Borneman does a good job of showing how the American war was, in English eyes, a sideshow to the struggles taking place in Europe. Wellington was one of several English generals who declined the command of the armies sent to America, which by 1814 included veterans of the Napoleonic wars. James Madison, vastly unpopular in New England (which seriously considered seceding from the Union), sent his best diplomats to attempt to negotiate a truce; England was willing, but saw no urgency to give in on the issue of impressment. When a deal was finally struck, it arrived too late to prevent the war’s culminating Battle of New Orleans, in which Andrew Jackson defeated a crack British army. Borneman argues, perhaps a bit too glibly, that the war effectively cemented the American union in the eyes of its citizens.
A solid performance, though, placing key events in a larger perspective without playing down the vast stupidity of many of the participants.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-053112-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
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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