Elegant and nimble history of a series of events likely unknown to many readers.
A sprightly social history of the convergence of pro- and anti-slavery agitators in the city of Washington during the explosive summer of 1835.
The forces that would soon tear the country apart in civil war were already at work in Washington as President Andrew Jackson was away on vacation. Salon Washington correspondent Morley (Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA, 2008, etc.) ably weaves the many strands together: An enterprising restaurateur of mixed race found that his success aroused the ire of resentful white patrons; an impressionable young slave hoping to educate and free himself ran afoul of his white mistress; a Yankee abolitionist newly arrived in town disseminated incendiary emancipationist literature; and the famous author of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” serving as Jackson’s district attorney, pursued his job of punishing vice and enforcing slavery. By July 1835, news of a slave rebellion in Mississippi had already created unease among white Washingtonians. When the young slave Arthur Bowen broke into the bedroom of his mistress, Anna Thornton, in the middle of the night on August 5, inebriated and carrying an axe, the city exploded in rumor and fear. Bowen had apparently been influenced by the antislavery literature of New Yorker Reuben Crandall, whom Key subsequently arrested and charged with “attempting to excite an insurrection.” A mob formed, threatening to lynch Bowen, and destroying much property, including mixed-race entrepreneur Beverly Snow’s popular Epicurean Eating House. Despite Thornton’s attempts to protect her beloved slave, Bowen was convicted and sentenced to hang. Morley alternates the characters and scenes of action for a suspenseful tale, culminating in the court of law where Key upheld the country’s oppression of African-Americans and thereby helped shape the rancorous debate over slavery. His brother-in-law Roger Taney (whom Key supported to power) would become chief justice of the Supreme Court and author of the Dred Scott decision.
Elegant and nimble history of a series of events likely unknown to many readers.Pub Date: July 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-385-53337-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
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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