A well-rendered, muscular history of a war whose ramifications are still being carefully calibrated.
A condensed new study of the Mexican-American war portrays America’s terrible loss of innocence.
Waging war against an unoffending neighbor changed the tenor of American politics in the mid 19th century, created a new crop of military leaders and aroused a deep anti-government suspicion among American citizens, writes Greenberg (History and Women’s Studies/Penn St. Univ.; Manifest Destiny and American Territorial Expansion: A Brief History with Documents, 2011, etc.). The rebellion of Texas from Mexican rule created a clamor for annexation, taken up first by President John Tyler in advance of congressional approval. The author focuses mainly on five individuals whose destinies were intimately tied up in the war with Mexico. Former Speaker of the House Henry Clay was morally opposed to annexation and lost his bid for the presidency in 1844 to James Polk, who used the expansionist frenzy to win political advantage, becoming the key advocate of Texas and California annexation. In the wake of Clay’s eloquent speech in Lexington, Ky., in 1847, denouncing the aggressive war against Mexico, Illinois congressman and fervent Clay admirer Abraham Lincoln distinguished himself in Congress with his own stirring emotional condemnation of the president’s evasive tactics. Two other lesser-known figures appear prominently: Illinois patriot and Lincoln’s Whig Party rival John Hardin represented the typical zealous volunteer to the Mexican conflict, grown quickly disillusioned by the senseless violence, while State Department clerk Nicholas Trist was secretly dispatched to Mexico by Polk to make a treaty advantageous to the U.S.—though Trist harbored great ambivalence.
A well-rendered, muscular history of a war whose ramifications are still being carefully calibrated.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-59269-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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
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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