Probably won’t settle any arguments.
A dark episode of the Civil War comes under scrutiny by an author who admits to having a fascination with 19th-century massacres.
Fort Pillow, Tenn., on the Mississippi River, housed some 650 federal troops in 1864. Among the soldiers, two types were locally hated with particular passion: “Tennessee Tories,” or homegrown unionists, and former slaves who had donned Yankee blue. On April 12, a force of some 2,300 veteran Confederate cavalrymen under Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest traveled across the western counties of Tennessee to attack Fort Pillow. Forrest, notes Ward (Dark Midnight When I Rise, 2000, etc.), had plenty of reason to despise both the Tories and the African-Americans in the Union ranks, for he had been a slave trader before the war, and unionist and abolitionist ideas were strong in much of the state. As Ward observes, Tennessee was the last of the Southern states to secede and enter the Confederacy, and was effectively the first to be reabsorbed into the Union. Not that that made life any easier for the former slaves; the unionists and the Union Army generals alike considered them to be well-suited for the heavy grunt work involved in being artillerists—“heaving shells and cannonballs, hauling cannon into place, pulling caissons, driving mules.” When Forrest’s troops arrived, they immediately set about butchering Yankees and former slaves: As Ward documents, scores were killed after they surrendered, as they did after a vigorous battle, one that the Confederates, by a contemporary account, considered “the hardest contested engagement that Forrest had ever been engaged in.” The battle remains surrounded in controversy: For their part, some Northern historians consider the attack on Fort Pillow to have been a premeditated massacre, whereas some Southern historians have ascribed the post-surrender killings to the confusion of battle, the alleged drunkenness of the artillerists and the like.
Probably won’t settle any arguments.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2005
ISBN: 0-670-03440-1
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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