A footnote to the larger history of the Revolution, of some interest to buffs.
A tale from the very beginnings of the republic—and of its disaffected military.
As Head (History/Univ. of Central Florida; Privateers of the Americas: Spanish American Privateering From the United States in the Early Republic, 2015, etc.) observes early on, the British didn’t march away after Yorktown, never to return. Instead, they retained control over New York as well as Savannah and Charleston and held them for another year and a half until the Treaty of Versailles was ratified. George Washington took his tired army to the banks of the Hudson River to keep an eye on the British, and there, at Newburgh, a “crisis of peace” emerged, one that pitted some of Washington’s officers against Congress. For its part, the Continental Army was still irregularly equipped and poorly paid while Congress and its civilian employees counted on regular paychecks and led comfortable lives in Philadelphia. Head recounts the origins of the revolt that came close to erupting within the ranks of the revolutionary forces, pitting the military against the government. Along the way, he examines Congress’ monetary policy and notes that financing the Revolution had led to near ruin not just because of the huge cost of the war, but also its inability to collect taxes across state lines, leading to “a canyon of debt” that made the dollar effectively worthless. Robert Morris, appointed superintendent of finance, floated credit from his own fortune until Alexander Hamilton could come along to straighten up the house, even as Washington quelled an uprising in the making that might have allowed Britain “to steal a victory in the end.” The author’s narrative has its moments, but his approach is of the rocks-for-jocks and gods-for-clods variety, as when he adverts to The Godfather (“But just when Morris thought he was out, Congress and the army pulled him back in”) and affects breeziness (“the British Army was really good”), slips that do the book no favors.
A footnote to the larger history of the Revolution, of some interest to buffs.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64313-081-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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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