What remains is a pleasing journey over well-blazed historical trails.
Biographical and background sketches from a pen skilled enough to attract Civil War buffs who seek renewal of their
knowledge about the era's best-known figures without requiring challenging new insights. Jones, a mathematician writing history, has sketched the portraits of seven Union and seven Confederate leaders who lived past 1865, only two of them (Jefferson Davis and Andrew Johnson) politicians. While adding nothing to what is already known of the men or the great conflict in which they were involved, the sketches are nevertheless deft examples of this classic genre of art—brief biographies that allow Jones to characterize and judge his subjects. He also provides additional non-biographical chapters on the fall of Richmond and the surrender at Appomattox Courthouse, both of which are movingly rendered. All are based upon appropriately wide reading in the pertinent published sources. Ranging from Robert E. Lee to George Armstrong Custer, from Phil Sheridan to John Bell Hood, Jones's heroes are the conventional characters in the written drama of this great war. He never considers how different that drama would have appeared if the worlds of war and its aftermath were filled out and affected by freed slaves, women, writers like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Walt Whitman, and abolitionists like Frederick Douglass—all available to Jones but omitted by him. Jones assumes, unexceptionably enough, that his subjects' postwar acts affected the nation in important ways. But because so much of each sketch is devoted to their pre-war and wartime lives, he ends up squandering a superb opportunity to examine in larger terms how the years following a war are often more significant to a society than its years in battle. He indicates what each of his 14 men did after the guns fell silent, but fails to demonstrate that what they did shaped the nation's history.
What remains is a pleasing journey over well-blazed historical trails.Pub Date: April 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-87833-176-X
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Taylor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000
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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