Another example of how miraculous the Union’s ultimate win really was.
Prolific military historian Axelrod (Miracle at Belleau Wood: The Birth of the Modern U.S. Marine Corps, 2007, etc.) takes a powerful look at one of the Civil War’s more grotesque episodes.
In June 1864, Confederate and Union positions dug in for what looked to be a long, intractable siege of Petersburg, Va. Lieutenant Colonel Henry Pleasants, serving under Major General Ambrose E. Burnside in the storied IX Corps, suggested that the impasse could be ended by digging a huge tunnel beneath a key section of the Confederates’ 20-mile entrenchment, planting explosives in it and detonating them, then launching an offensive taking advantage of the element of surprise. What seemed simple on paper became increasingly complex and thoroughly misguided in execution. Pleasants’ 48th Pennsylvania Infantry, which dug the 510-foot tunnel, was plagued by problems arising from the soldiers’ ignorance of modern engineering. The Union’s post-explosion plans were a classic case study in military incompetence. Descriptions of scores of Union soldiers losing their lives in a massive trench devised by their own army make for a suspenseful, devastating read. If the Battle of the Crater wasn’t nearly as bloody as Antietam or Gettysburg, it was nevertheless one of the Civil War’s more grisly events. Using just enough illuminating field correspondence, Axelrod details the faulty reasoning of both armies at almost every level of command, revealing no lack of human bravery and foibles among the men behind the medallions. He nicely accents his economical narrative with analyses of the main players’ personalities: how rancor in the ranks led to disorganization; how grudges and jealousies undermined unity of purpose; and how poor equipment, and even poorer intelligence and racism, ensured the offensive’s total failure.
Another example of how miraculous the Union’s ultimate win really was.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-78671-811-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
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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