Still, Civil War buffs will learn a thing or two from Alexander’s considerations of events.
The Stars and Bars might yet wave, if only someone could have convinced Robert E. Lee not to attempt all those frontal assaults on heavily defended positions.
Alexander, having previously pondered the business of military success (How Wars Are Won, 2002, etc.) and how wars could have turned out otherwise (How Hitler Could Have Won World War II, 2000), begins by observing that as a general Lee “was vastly superior to all of the Union commanders who came against him.” Yet at Gettysburg and elsewhere, he insisted on the brute-force tactics of throwing men against fortified lines in the hope of frightening the enemy into running, which may have worked in an earlier century but, toward the end of the war, did not phase the better-armed and vastly more numerous federals. Against Union commanders who, until Grant arrived on the scene, were content to stay behind their fortifications, Lee could have made different choices. Alexander wonders why the Confederates did not move on Washington after the rout that was First Manassas, a tactic that could have ended the war. Another counterfactual: Had Stonewall Jackson not died, he might have carried off a later move on Washington, and in all events would have warned Lee not to throw away his army at Pickett’s Charge. Interestingly, Alexander observes, William Tecumseh Sherman seems to have had an epiphany somewhere that led him to borrow Jackson’s style, another turning point in the war. Alexander has a firm command of the military aspects of the struggle. Yet, as recent books such as David J. Eicher’s Dixie Betrayed (2006) argue, the war was lost as much politically as militarily, and on that Alexander is largely silent.
Still, Civil War buffs will learn a thing or two from Alexander’s considerations of events.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-34599-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 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
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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