by Peter Guardino ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 28, 2017
The Mexican-American War is too little studied today. Guardino’s swift-moving, broad-ranging history is a welcome remedy.
The history of a war of expansion and empire that reverberates today in talk of border walls and deportation.
Viewed through a retrospective lens, the American invasion of Mexico in 1846, an act of single-sided aggression, has eerie parallels with later incursions in Vietnam and Iraq. For one thing, all were adventures that enjoyed public support at first but that lost backing as time wore on. It was also precipitated, writes Guardino (History/Indiana Univ.; The Time of Liberty: Popular Political Culture in Oaxaca, 1750-1850, 2005, etc.) in this vigorous, readable account, by an American president who “had to hide crucial information and engage in intense partisan maneuvering to start the war.” Moreover, during the two years of conflict, Mexicans waged a fierce guerrilla war, while in response, the Americans “increasingly made civilians responsible for the activities of guerrillas” and committed terrible reprisals. The American soldiers, writes the author, “saw guerrilla warfare not as proof of Mexican nationalism but instead as proof that many Mexicans were violent and treacherous racial inferiors.” In a narrative that blends set-piece accounts of battle, profiles of individual combatants, and wide-ranging explorations of larger issues, Guardino examines the inevitability of American victory, which proved Pyrrhic. Some of our received wisdom about the conflict, he argues, does not hold up. The Mexican forces, for example, didn’t break and run at every encounter but in the main fought capably, especially the members of the volunteer militias and National Guard. Mexico, only recently independent of Spain, was defeated in the end as much by a lack of materials and funds as by force of arms. Furthermore, the author writes, the Mexican-American War preceded and in some ways produced two civil wars, one in Mexico and the other in the U.S. The Mexican war revealed how disunited the U.S. was, with sharp regional distinctions and, of course, the issue of slavery looming over the whole enterprise.
The Mexican-American War is too little studied today. Guardino’s swift-moving, broad-ranging history is a welcome remedy.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-674-97234-6
Page Count: 500
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
HISTORY | MILITARY | UNITED STATES | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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