Packed with impeccable scholarship and insightful analysis.
America grows from embryo to newborn, nurtured by an international cast of characters.
With European explorers, Native Americans and African slaves converging on North America over a short period of time, the history of the not-yet–United States reads like a multicultural history of the world, which is just how Polk (Understanding Iraq, 2005, etc.) presents it in this concise narrative. Wars and internal strife in England, France and Spain forced outcasts, misfits and lawbreakers to set sail for the New World. There they met Native Americans, who were less nomadic and more civilized than traditional representations would lead us to believe, and utilized African slaves, who introduced farming and mining techniques far more advanced than those practiced by European settlers. Rather than furthering the conventional notion of a “melting pot,” Polk’s evenhanded, evocative account shows disparate groups fighting to carve out their niches in harsh new surroundings. Perhaps most interesting is his explication of events leading up to the Revolutionary War. Honing in on economic causes for the split, the author sees logical reasons for British irritation with the ungrateful colonists; he also understands why the Americans, emboldened by years of near-independence due to England’s internal struggles, felt slighted. The fight for independence was not waged by a patriotic and unified nation, Polk declares. Rather, it was conducted by a loose coalition of states whose white inhabitants were nearly as different from each other as they were from slaves and Native Americans. Ultimately, however, this motley alliance was able to call on the shared experiences of criminals, religious pariahs and intrepid adventurers to unite them as they took up arms against the mother country to obtain the one thing that many of them had sought all along: freedom, or at least their version of it.
Packed with impeccable scholarship and insightful analysis.Pub Date: April 7, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-075090-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2006
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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