A clear, coherent, and even suspenseful account of the American Revolution.
A vivid re-creation of the Revolutionary War in the American South, a guerrilla-style conflict that paved the way for the British surrender at Yorktown.
In this intriguing work of military and social history, Crawford, author of Unwise Passions, argues convincingly that the South was where “the most decisive battles…were fought.” The author mines the historical record to show that the Southern conflict was an exceedingly violent version of a guerrilla war, one that pitted loyalists against revolutionaries at every level of Southern society. Gen. Nathanael Greene, taking command of the American side after some near-catastrophic losses, understood “that he had stepped into what a later generation would also call a civil war. Neighbors were killing each other with horrifying regularity.” On the field of battle, conditions were punishing. Infectious diseases and starvation stalked the soldiers as both sides employed scorched-earth tactics and fought bitterly to hold their ground in South and North Carolina. Many Americans barely remember learning about the siege of Charleston and the battles of Camden, Kings Mountain, and Cowpens, but these were crucial to the eventual victory at Yorktown. There were some heroes, such as Johann von Robais, a superb German military officer who died fighting for the Americans, but there were cruel and opportunistic officers on both sides: the “coldblooded and ruthless” British officer Banastre Tarleton and American officer Thomas Sumter, who authorized his troops to pay themselves by plundering property, which included enslaved people. Crawford follows the revolutionaries in their quest to cut off British supply lines from the coast to the backcountry. The author could have strengthened his superior account with more attention to the loyalists’ point of view. Nonetheless, he provides a clear picture of the stark cost of American independence on both sides of the conflict.
A clear, coherent, and even suspenseful account of the American Revolution.Pub Date: July 2, 2024
ISBN: 9780593318508
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
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
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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