Contrary to prevailing belief, winning the Battle of Yorktown was not enough to win the War for Independence. Fowler (History/Northeastern Univ.; Empires at War: The French and Indian War and the Struggle for North America, 1754-1763, 2005, etc.) examines how the young country was held together until the formal cessation of hostilities in 1783.
Debts, revenue raising, military expenditure and pensions, political faction, international intrigue—the author pulls together the threads of this period into a fast-paced presentation of what was necessary to win the peace. Though Cornwallis' troops were imprisoned after his defeat, the Redcoats were not about to leave. Savannah, Charleston, New York City and Penobscot Bay were still under occupation, and George III's troops and mercenaries continued to present a serious threat. Even more so, as Fowler documents, because of the combination of near bankruptcy and factional stalemate which, under the quorum and unanimity rules of the Articles of Confederation, rendered the Continental Congress impotent. The regular army bore the brunt of the political crisis. On one hand, every new indication that peace was at hand made it more difficult to keep the command together against desertion. On the other hand, Congress lacked the revenue to provide the financial resources which would enable Washington and his officers to secure the domestic front. Britain's commander in chief in New York was reporting regularly on the prospects for dissolution of the U.S. Army and the potential to recover his colonial possessions by taking advantage of internal strife. Fowler's narrative builds to a dramatic climax on in March 1783, when Washington and his staff outmaneuvered potential mutiny and revolt and secured unity on the question of pay and pensions. After that, British withdrawal, loyalists and other issues could be dealt with. Solid history on the war after the war.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8027-1706-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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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