Alexander (Korea, 1986), in a significant and well-argued contribution to the already massive corpus of Robert E. Lee/Stonewall Jackson scholarship, asserts that ``Stonewall Jackson, not Lee, possessed the strategic vision necessary to win key battles''—and perhaps the Civil War. Douglas Southall Freeman's classic Lee's Lieutenants (1942-46) crystallized the scholarly consensus about Lee and Jackson: Lee was a masterly strategist, perhaps the greatest America has ever produced, while Jackson was a brilliant tactician who lacked the stuff of overall command. Here, however, Alexander argues that Lee prevented Jackson from crossing the Potomac to intimidate Washington and demolish northern industries, and stopped him from destroying Pope's Union army. On at least four occasions, Jackson attempted unsuccessfully to convince Lee and Jefferson Davis ``to mount an invasion of the North and to challenge the will of the Northern people to wage war.'' In reviewing the amazing, though familiar, story of how Jackson bedeviled vastly superior Union forces in the Shenandoah Valley, Alexander demonstrates the striking aggressiveness and creativity of Jackson's strategic vision, and he speculates that, at Chancellorsville, Jackson was fatally wounded just as he was about to ``destroy all or most of the Army of the Potomac and to leave the North powerless to prevent invasion.'' While these speculations about Jackson make for interesting reading, the fact is that Jackson's eccentric and difficult personality marginalized his influence on the strategic planning of the South; moreover, attempted Confederate invasions of the North such as those proposed by Jackson invariably resulted in disaster. Alexander recognizes that neither he nor any other historian can answer the absorbing question of whether the South could have prevailed had Jackson lived, or had it pursued Jackson's more pugnacious strategy, but the author makes a compelling case that Lee's pursuit of limited objectives ultimately assured a Union victory. An enjoyable and thoughtful exercise in ``what if'' history, and a fine reassessment of Jackson's military career. (Sixteen pages of maps.)
Pub Date: Nov. 23, 1992
ISBN: 0-8050-1830-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1992
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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