The world will little note nor long remember this poorly reasoned, quarrelsome little tract.
From Adams (Those Dirty Rotten Taxes, 1998), a selectively argued, sometimes absurd polemic against Abraham Lincoln and the Union.
Abraham Lincoln assumed in the Second Inaugural Address that his audience knew that slavery `was, somehow, the cause of the war.` Adams disagrees: brushing aside massive historical evidence to the contrary (including the observations of northern and southern contemporaries) and relying heavily on British rather than American writers about the war, Adams asserts that the slavery was a non-issue devised as a pretext to justify Lincoln's unconstitutional `assault` on the South. He argues instead, with extraordinarily slender evidence, that the preservation of taxes and revenues from the South were somehow the cause of the war. Validly, though not particularly controversially, Adams argues against the Lincoln administration's suspension of habeas corpus and its practice of suppressing dissent in the North, although he fails to discuss the Confederacy's attitudes toward internal political dissent. Less reasonably, Adams excoriates Lincoln for not observing constitutional niceties in 1861 with a hostile southern army nearby (arguing that Lincoln had no authority to do anything more than call Congress into session), and he appears to go well beyond historical evidence in attributing the entire war to northern contentiousness about the low southern tariff. Adams grounds his argument for the legitimacy of southern secession in the language of the Declaration of Independence, ignoring the fact that no southern state except Texas had ever been independent and that millions of slaves were not consulted in the southern ordinances of secession. Finally, he renders an absurd, quibbling attack on Lincoln's Gettysburg Address: among other objections, he feels the American Revolution did not establish the US as a `new nation, conceived in liberty` and that US national existence and democracy were not at stake in the Civil War.
The world will little note nor long remember this poorly reasoned, quarrelsome little tract.Pub Date: March 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8476-9722-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
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 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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
