A fresh look at Civil War history.
An unlikely spy.
Reporter and podcast host Willis recounts the life of the intrepid Elizabeth Van Lew (1818-1900), who mounted a successful spy ring from her home in the Confederate stronghold of Richmond, Virginia. Born into wealth and privilege in a family with Northern roots, she was a Union sympathizer, and though her family owned slaves, she opposed slavery. Raised to be a Southern belle, she was transformed by war “from a serious but directionless young woman into an iron-willed spymaster.” In the early days of the conflict, she and her mother risked threats to their lives to help imprisoned wounded Union soldiers. Those prisoners of war passed on to her information, overheard from their guards, about Rebel troop movements. Books she lent the men came back with secret notes and encoded messages that she relayed to Union commanders. Her efforts were augmented by a ring of like-minded civilians, including her own Black servants, German anti-slavery business owners, and other Union sympathizers whom she learned about when the Confederate government penned them together in prison. These secret activists worked to gather and pass on intelligence and to smuggle Union soldiers across enemy lines. While the soldiers waited to escape, she hid them on the third floor of her Richmond mansion. Van Lew proved a wily spy, even using a cipher to convert letters into numerical code—a cipher she kept for the rest of her life. When Ulysses S. Grant became president, he rewarded her invaluable aid by naming her to the remunerative position of Richmond’s postmaster. Willis draws on Van Lew’s published diary, a biography of Van Lew, and biographies of Civil War figures to create a brisk, well-populated chronicle of her subject’s perilous work.
A fresh look at Civil War history.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9780063333659
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
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 Yorkerstaff 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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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