An able balance of scholarly precision and readability.
An absorbing study of the Confederacy’s last hours and a city in ruins.
The Southern secession was no monolithic enterprise, to judge from this account by Virginia historian Lankford (The Last American Aristocrat, 1996). Richmond may have been the capital and nerve center of the Confederacy, but it was crawling with politicians and citizens who despised Jefferson Davis, feckless generals and disgruntled privates, and not a few members of the “Unionist underground,” including a southern belle who “placed one of her free black servants as an agent in Jefferson Davis’s household.” Southern apologists have long suggested that someone from this large group of well-motivated suspects set the ravaging fire that greeted conquering Federal forces in the spring of 1865. Lankford clears up the question definitively: the great fire was set after Davis had fled the city by Confederate soldiers seeking to deny the enemy the last of the rebel army’s supplies, and though it has passed into legend as a monumental catastrophe, it destroyed only some ten percent of the city—enough, however, to provide newspapers with the “pictures of devastation that people in the North craved.” Lankford’s smoke-filled pages are dense with well-chosen anecdotes, such as his portrait of an exasperated Robert E. Lee at Appomattox catching sight of the disgraced General George Pickett and spitting out, “Is that man still with this army?” The author examines and dismisses a few myths along the way, including the why-can’t-we-all-get-along saw that Lee later prayed with an African-American gentleman in a gesture of national healing, an episode evidently invented to hide “differences that cannot be masked by the warm sepia tone cast over our great national trauma by popular books and documentary films.”
An able balance of scholarly precision and readability.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2002
ISBN: 0-670-03117-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2002
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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