Lockhart (History/Wright State Univ.; The Drillmaster of Valley Forge: The Baron de Steuben and the Making of the American Army, 2008, etc.) suggests that conventional Fourth of July hyperbole about the Battle of Bunker Hill “confuses history with heritage, conflates fantasy and patriotic sentiment.”
The author compares the British and American forces and find them both made up of poorly trained raw recruits, led by generals—Thomas Gage and Artemas Ward—who had profited from the lessons of the French and Indian War, in which they had fought side-by-side. The American militiamen were settled farmers, not hardy frontiersman, and the British army was not the finest in the world. Gage had gained respect for American militiamen and recognized the need for marksmanship, while Ward recognized the importance of drill and light infantry tactics. The Massachusetts Provincial Congress and the Committee of Safety were prepared to respond quickly and decisively when Gage moved his army into Concord and Lexington to quell the incipient rebellion. However, the militiamen who responded enthusiastically to the call to protect their colony were not prepared for a war, and Ward faced the problem of establishing even rudimentary discipline in camp. Lockhart explores how the militant Massachusetts leadership—Ward, Samuel Adams, Joseph Warren, General Ward and Israel Putnam—were spoiling for a decisive battle. For six weeks—until British forces were reinforced—the militia commanded the heights surrounding Boston. Ironically, the actual battle on June 17 was not fought on Bunker Hill as planned, but on the less defensible, neighboring Breed’s Hill; the author calls the battle a “triumphant defeat.” Yet this was a mixed blessing because it obscured the need for a disciplined and trained army in order to defeat the British. Nonetheless, as the author ably demonstrates, the actual story is “about ordinary people who, when put to the test, did extraordinary things.”
Pub Date: June 7, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-195886-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
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 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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