Characters come brilliantly to life, and events, some awful and unbelievable, are vividly painted in this important and beautifully written history. Anderson (History/Univ. of Colorado) here earns his crown as the preeminent chronicler of what Americans know as the French and Indian War. Author of a previous work on the fighting men of that conflict (A People’s Army, 1984), he displays massive erudition, deft command of a sprawling array of sources, familiarity with all the relevant written histories, and, happily, the ability to tell what amounts to an extended series of whopping good tales. Behind all the hundreds of arresting incidents lies his argument this 18th-century world war was not simply a precursor to the American Revolution but a coequal influence with it in creating the American republic. Anderson’s way of getting to that claim ought especially to draw readers interested in the supposedly “dead,” traditional subjects of imperial politics, institutions, battles, and war. The continent’s vast collection of people—British, French, colonists, and natives from all walks of life—play their part. Most important, Indians occupy key roles in deciding the fate of the great imperial powers, and thus of the future American nation. George Washington is a principal actor upon the stage. A wonderful dividend is Anderson’s superbly captioned illustrations, some of them printed here for the first time; in addition, the maps put those in many other histories to shame. It will be a long time before the tale of this great war for empire in the New World needs to be told again. And it’s unlikely that it will ever be told so well. A scholarly book artfully written for general readers who seek a rousing, epic yarn and the best sort of history. (90 illus., 9 maps)
Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-40642-5
Page Count: 960
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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
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