Here, LSU history professor Royster (Light-Horse Harry Lee and the Legacy of the American Revolution, 1981; A Revolutionary People at War, 1980) shows how both the North and South clamored for massive and lethal action against one another in the Civil War, only to find that the violence surpassed their fantasies of mayhem in unexpectedly nasty ways. Largely foregoing discussions of weaponry and strategy in favor of individual and mass motivation, Royster ably illustrates how war was used to resolve deep uncertainties over liberty and federal authority dating back to the American Revolution. Not by accident were the two fiercest warriors of the conflict Jackson and Sherman, who ``epitomized the waging of successful war by drastic measures justified with claims to righteousness.'' For Jackson, with a Calvinist zeal for self-improvement, the war was an attempt to prove, on a national scale, that ``you can be whatever you resolve to be''; for Sherman, the war had to be brought to a swift halt before it undermined the foundations of order he had seen threatened in post-Gold Rush San Francisco and antebellum Louisiana. Royster's blend of brilliantly written descriptive tableaus (e.g., Jackson's mortal wounding at Chancellorsville by friendly fire, Sherman's destruction of Columbia, S.C.) and analysis of both sides' heated rhetoric is not particularly smooth. But he skillfully explains why Jackson and Sherman became such powerful symbols of unrelenting determination—and he demonstrates how Yankees and Rebels yielded successively to illusion, shock, ever-mounting slaughter, and endless postwar efforts to justify the violence. A subtle and elegant attempt to examine the hearts and minds of Unionists and Confederates—and the drastic means both used to give shape to radically different visions of nationality and freedom. (Twenty-two photographs and six maps—not seen.)
Pub Date: Oct. 16, 1991
ISBN: 0-394-52485-3
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1991
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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