Beautifully written and thoroughly original—quite unlike any other Civil War book out there.
A penetrating look at the crowded moment when the antebellum world began to turn.
The zeitgeist is by definition ephemeral and difficult to recapture—think, for example, of a period as recent as America before 9/11—but that’s the neat trick splendidly accomplished here by journalist and historian Goodheart, now director of Washington College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience. History, he reminds us, is composed not merely of the momentous judgments of government ministers and generals, but also of the countless decisions of ordinary people. These responses to unexpected challenges are complicated, not always predictable and, taken together, have the power to shift events decisively. Such a time was 1861, when the “Old Gentlemen” (the likes of Buchanan, Tyler and Crittenden) gave way to the self-made men (exemplified by Lincoln, multiplied by a still younger generation of strivers like James Garfield and Elmer Ellsworth); when the Republican marching clubs, the Wide Awakes, and the exotic Zouave drill team became something more than quasi-military; when the transcontinental telegraph replaced the Pony Express; when trolley-car executive William Sherman and shop clerk Ulysses Grant looked on as two unsavory men preserved Missouri for the Union; when fugitive slaves suddenly became “contrabands”; when a general in San Francisco and a major at Fort Sumter, notwithstanding their Southern sympathies, remained faithful to their military oath; when surging patriotism and romantic notions of war turned to hatred and bloodlust; when an unfolding national crisis required people to choose sides, sweep away old assumptions and rattle categories long deemed unshakeable, and bring forth something new. Whether limning the likes of Benjamin “Spoons” Butler, abolitionist Abby Kelley Foster or the young Abner Doubleday, explaining something as seemingly inconsequential as the fashion for men’s beards or unpacking Lincoln’s profound understanding of the nature and unacceptable consequences of the rebellion, Goodheart’s sure grasp never falters.
Beautifully written and thoroughly original—quite unlike any other Civil War book out there.Pub Date: April 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4015-5
Page Count: 460
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011
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 Yorker staff 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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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