There’s not much news here, but fans of Sharpe, Aubrey, Bezukhov, and the like will appreciate Zamoyski’s vivid...
In which the famed French emperor seals his doom by marching headlong into a country that would not be tamed.
Polish historian Zamoyski (Holy Madness, 2000, etc.) has an eye for irony, and though he does not specifically point out parallels, the French invasion of Russia in 1812 finds echoes in current events. His aides warned Napoleon not to invade, fearing that while the French army was distracted, subject states across Europe would take the occasion to revolt. Alexander, the Russian tsar, had warned a French diplomat that “if it came to war he would go on fighting, in the depths of Russia if necessary, and would never sign a peace dictated to him in his capital,” and it was evident before the war began that partisan forces and the weather could combine to do more damage than any Russian army. Still, Napoleon decided to take the battle to Russia, citing threats that did not appear to have much basis in fact. He must have thought he could beat the Russian army, which was made up of mostly non-Russian officers commanding a force of men who were all but serfs under arms: as Zamoyski writes with characteristic attention to detail, a Russian private’s enlistment term was for 25 years, and his family was likely to write him off as dead the moment the induction notice came; whenever possible, it seemed, Russian soldiers deserted by the drove. Yet the Russians stood and fought, as they always did when their homeland was threatened; as Zamoyski writes, the Battle of Borodino alone was “the greatest massacre in recorded history, not to be surpassed until the first day of the Somme in 1916.” And then there was the winter, of course, which trimmed the French army logarithmically even as Napoleon decided to resort to Plan B: “He resolved to hasten back to Paris, where he would raise a new army in time to sally forth in the spring and not only reassert his control over central Europe but also defeat the Russians.”
There’s not much news here, but fans of Sharpe, Aubrey, Bezukhov, and the like will appreciate Zamoyski’s vivid reconstruction of events.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-107558-2
Page Count: 672
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 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
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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