A vivid account of an impressive Revolutionary War unit and a can’t-miss choice for fans of O’Donnell’s previous books.
The Revolutionary War achievements of a Massachusetts regiment that, while not necessarily indispensable, deserves this admirable history.
Prolific military historian O’Donnell begins with a history of Marblehead, Massachusetts, the second-largest New England town during this period. With an economy driven by fishing, its citizens were already primed to dislike British officials, who heavily regulated the trade and outraged its sailors by impressing them into the Royal Navy. Following the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, and the oppression of Britain’s “Intolerable Acts,” Marblehead citizens formed their own committees of correspondence, Sons of Liberty, and minutemen—a bumpy process because the city contained a pugnacious and often subversive loyalist faction. By the time fighting broke out in 1775, the town militia consisted of a series of companies that ultimately formed a regiment led by John Glover, “the most experienced officer.” As the author points out, the forces included a surprising number of Blacks and Native soldiers. O’Donnell delivers an expert history of the first two years of the Revolution, with an emphasis on Glover’s regiment. After the siege of Boston, Glover and his troops accompanied George Washington south to New York, where he suffered the disastrous defeat on Long Island. The author demonstrates—and most historians agree—that Washington’s army was saved by a secret overnight evacuation to Manhattan in boats manned by Marblehead seamen. The regiment performed well during Washington’s retreat across Manhattan and New Jersey before truly winning glory by conveying troops across the ice-choked Delaware to the heralded victory at Trenton in December 1776. Other units failed to cross. During this period, many Marbleheaders fitted out vessels as privateers whose captains and crews, many from Glover’s regiment, began seizing British merchant vessels, marking the “origins of the US Navy.” By January, the regiment’s enlistments expired, and many, sick and often wounded, walked the 300 miles back to their now-impoverished city—though some stayed to fight.
A vivid account of an impressive Revolutionary War unit and a can’t-miss choice for fans of O’Donnell’s previous books.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8021-5689-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
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
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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