An accessible treatment of a war often viewed through the lens of the revolution that followed, though much more complex...
Blame it on George Washington: a war that spilled from the Appalachian backwoods onto battlefields around the world.
The French and Indian War, known in Europe as the Seven Years War even though it lasted for nine, was one of the bloodiest episodes in the centuries-long war between England and France. At stake, writes Massachusetts Historical Society director Fowler (Under Two Flags, 1990, etc.), was which power would have dominion over the world beyond Europe. Indeed, the war was played out eventually in Europe, Asia, and Africa as well as in the Caribbean and North America. That outcome may have been in the cards anyway, but it was hastened along when George Washington, then a 22-year-old major in the Virginia militia, unwittingly presided over a massacre of French prisoners who’d been seized by England’s Indian allies. Or so he later explained, though Fowler sensibly adds that “It remains an open question to why Washington felt compelled to attack a sleeping camp without warning at a time when the two nations were at peace.” Soon British and French fleets were sailing, and the conflict shifted from the Appalachians to eastern Canada. Fowler’s narrative moves forward partly through thoughtful character sketches of some of the principal participants, from the justly ignored (the larcenous governor Francois Bigot, “a particularly clever and imaginative bookkeeper”) to the honored-for-all-time (the Marquis de Montcalm, buried with full military honors only in 2001, and his fellow victim at the siege of Quebec, James Wolfe). Well crafted and well paced, the narrative reveals some of the political complexities of the war, among them the controversy surrounding Wolfe’s appointment by the untested William Pitt and the crown’s enforcement of peace on the frontier, the latter being one of the things that would soon turn the American colonies against the mother country.
An accessible treatment of a war often viewed through the lens of the revolution that followed, though much more complex than only that.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8027-1411-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 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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