By National Public Radio producer Trudeau (Out of the Storm, 1994, etc.), another solid contribution to Civil War literature, this time about the experience of the so-called Colored Troops, who fought on the Union side. In recent years, films and books, particularly Joseph T. Glatthaar's Forged in Battle, have focused scholarly attention on the once-neglected exploits of the more than 175,000 black troops who fought in the Civil War. In an account more thorough and expansive than Glatthaar's, Trudeau shows little-known varieties of black military experience: Amazingly, free blacks in the South offered their military services to the Confederacy at the war's outset, before the North made abolition one of its wartime goals, and blacks in the multiracial areas of Louisiana and the Trans- Mississippi had well-developed military traditions dating back to the War of 1812. The Confederacy never made use of blacks as soldiers, however. Well before the final Emancipation Proclamation, units of back US troops were being sent into combat. Trudeau describes how, unreasonably, Northern editors and military men repeatedly asked whether the former slaves could fight as well as white men, even after units of the ``US Colored Troops'' had proved that they could. Trudeau compellingly captures many of their actions in detail, including moments of glory, like the capture of Fort Fisher by black troops on Jan. 15, 1865; moments of tragedy and bravery, like the failed July 18, 1863, assault on Fort Wagner; and moments of savagery, like the massacre of black soldiers at Fort Pillow by Confederates under Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest on April 12, 1864. Trudeau also traces the curious historical fate of the African-American soldiers after their mustering out: In the revisionist historiography and racist culture of early 20th centry America, they were forgotten, and even in African-American culture and literature, their achievements were neglected. Another fine work by Trudeau, and a good companion to Glatthaar's study.
Pub Date: Feb. 2, 1998
ISBN: 0-316-85325-9
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1997
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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