Just as commercial blight covers the once bloodstained battlefields of Franklin and Nashville, so have other Civil War battles obscured the significance of Rebel defeats there. Here, Sword (Shiloh, 1974) compellingly re-creates the heroism, missed chances, political backbiting, and flawed Rebel leadership underlying the outcome at these killing grounds. In the summer of 1864, desperate to halt Sherman's campaign through Georgia, Jefferson Davis named John Bell Hood to head the Army of the Tennessee, a force torn apart by quarreling generals. Wounded in love and war, Hood, with his melancholy mien and artificial leg, seemed to embody the Southern chevalier—yet a subordinate summed him up as having ``a lion's heart'' but ``a wooden head.'' Sword is equally uncharitable: ``a disabled personality prone to miscalculation and misperception...a fool with a license to kill his own men.'' In November and December, Hood's post-Atlanta dash into Tennessee (an attempt to threaten Sherman's supply lines and terrorize Union strongholds in the Ohio Valley) was catastrophic: miscommunication that foiled a chance to crumple up a Federal column at Spring Hill; an angry frontal attack against Union entrenchments the next day at Franklin, remembered as ``the Gettysburg of the West'' because of the desperate valor and needless sacrifice of the Confederate rank and file; a stinging lesson in strategy at the Battle of Nashville from Hood's former West Point instructor, the Union's methodical George G. Thomas; and the miserable attempt to escape the Federals in icy weather. The outcome was unprecedented: 23,500 casualties out of 38,000 Confederate troops—the only instance in the war when an entire army collapsed as a fighting force. A critical Civil War campaign, narrated with brisk attention to the nuances of strategy—and with measured solemnity over the waste of life in war. (Forty-six b&w photographs and 17 maps—not seen.)
Pub Date: Feb. 12, 1992
ISBN: 0-06-016301-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1991
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
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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