An entertaining account of a single year of unexceptional significance.
Longtime political journalist Bicknell (co-editor: Politics in America 2012, 2011) presents a diverting snapshot of America in 1844.
It was a time of great enthusiasms, some good, some not. Philadelphia was rocked twice by nativist riots against Irish Catholics. The followers of William Miller prepared to welcome Christ's return to Earth, first in March, then in October, with disappointing results. John C. Frémont returned from an exploratory mission to Oregon and California as parties of settlers headed West from Missouri; Bicknell follows one of these, chronicling one family's tribulations on the journey. Political passions raged in this presidential election year, particularly over the proposed annexation of the Republic of Texas, an issue that provoked controversies over the territorial expansion of slavery and the likelihood of war with Mexico. The Whigs chose Henry Clay as their nominee, replacing the unpopular incumbent John Tyler; Clay proceeded to shoot himself in the foot repeatedly with ill-conceived statements fudging his position on Texas. The pro-annexation dark horse James K. Polk emerged with the Democrats' nomination after a protracted convention battle reported in real time over Morse's new telegraph. The Mormon prophet Joseph Smith was also a candidate but was murdered by a mob in jail. Bicknell tells all these stories and more with enthusiasm, exceptional narrative skills and sound historical judgment. Ultimately, however, the events of this rather ordinary year never cohere into a thematic whole, a sense that the events unique to 1844 really made much of a difference. The problems of the Millerites and Mormons affected only a few, and resolution of the Texas issue was deferred to another day. While a Clay presidency would have taken the country down a very different path, Bicknell concedes that Polk's victory did not result from a decisive turning point in national attitudes but happened largely because Clay just wasn't a very good candidate.
An entertaining account of a single year of unexceptional significance.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1613730102
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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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