An admirable and engrossing account of the largely overlooked contribution naval might made to the Union's victory in the Civil War, from a historian who has a genuine flair for recreating the riverine and seaboard battles that marked this conflict. Drawing on contemporary sources and eyewitness testimony from the gallant sailors who fought for both the Blue and the Gray, Musicant (The Banana Wars, 1990, etc.) offers a detailed log of how the US Navy transformed itself under fire from a military embarrassment into a world-class force. In the course of making itself a maritime power, the industrialized North strangled the agrarian South with a blockade that denied the Confederacy not only war materials but also consistent contact with foreign nations that, in different circumstances, might have supported the rebel cause. While the Confederate Navy took a fatal beating in the coastal waters, estuaries, and rivers where the Civil War's maritime campaigns were waged, it ruled the deep, where a dozen or so oceangoing raiders effectively drove US merchant shipping from global sea-lanes. The author provides rousing rundowns on the feats of the renegades who captained these privateers (at least one of which continued to wreak havoc months after Appomattox). Covered as well are the abortive efforts to relieve Fort Sumter at the start of hostilities, the Battle of Mobile Bay (when Admiral David Farragut indeed said, ``Damn the torpedoes!''), a series of prototypical amphibious operations (including the assault on South Carolina's Port Royal), the desperate mission of the CSS Hunley (arguably the first true submarine, whose sunken remains may recently have been found by deep-diving archaeologists), and the storied clash of ironclads in which the USS Monitor dueled the CSS Virginia (a.k.a. Merrimack) to a bloody standstill. Musicant gives readers a fantail seat for the Union's triumphs and setbacks during the Civil War. (32 pages b&w photos and maps, not seen)
Pub Date: Aug. 2, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-016482-4
Page Count: 512
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1995
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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