A dramatic and engaging addition to Civil War studies that serves as a fitting bookend paired with Jay Winik’s account of...
It was 1860 in Charleston, South Carolina, the political epicenter of the Old South, at a time of polarized partisanship. Things did not turn out well at all.
Journalist Starobin (After America: Narratives for the Next Global Age, 2009) describes the year before the Civil War officially began with the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor. The Southern economy and its way of life depended on cotton and the labor provided by slavery to support it. As many of Charleston’s prominent men argued, if there was agitation to break away from the federal Union, that was the fault of the North, with its increasing reluctance to sanction slavery. The Democratic National Convention in Charleston was riven. Yankee delegates named one presidential candidate; secessionists named another. The city’s gentry imagined a confederacy of states standing alone. Starobin artfully depicts the few townsmen who were more cautious and the many publishers, planters, lawyers, and others who led the secessionists. As sentiment for rebellion increased, so did restrictions on the city’s free blacks, and a diverse selection of uniformed militia—e.g., the Washington Light Infantry and the Charleston Light Dragoons—paraded around town. As the election countdown proceeded with jingoist crowds, meetings, and bombast, Southern blood heated up, ready to be spilled. There was no turning back. A Secession Convention proclaimed the state’s departure from the Union, followed by a great celebration. Throughout, Starobin’s narrative pulses with partisan agitation. With speeches and letters of the period, the author demonstrates that the fight was less about states’ rights than what many Southerners believed were their rights to own human chattel. His story of the fraught year ends before the firing on besieged Sumter, and his final chapter describes utterly destroyed Charleston after Appomattox.
A dramatic and engaging addition to Civil War studies that serves as a fitting bookend paired with Jay Winik’s account of the end of the war, April 1865 (2001).Pub Date: April 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61039-622-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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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