One corner of the great American panorama enlarged to highlight its starry-eyed visionaries, political machinations,...
Crisp, insightful history of the canal that transformed New York into the Empire State and the US into an economic powerhouse.
Stretching 363 miles from Buffalo on Lake Erie to Albany on the Hudson River, the Erie Canal was the technological marvel of its age. Its celebrated opening in 1825 culminated a century of effort by dreamers, tinkerers, merchants, and politicians who sought to build an artificial waterway linking the trans-Appalachian region to the Atlantic seaboard. Bernstein (The Power of Gold, 2000, etc.) deftly lays out those efforts. In the young republic, canal-building often failed. George Washington’s attempt to create one along the Potomac River, for instance, was a financial disaster, later prompting Thomas Jefferson to dismiss the idea of a canal to the west as “little short of madness.” It took brilliant, hard-nosed New York governor DeWitt Clinton to push the Erie Canal through a thicket of obstacles, including lack of financial assistance by the federal government or any sister state, the War of 1812, and nine years of stalemate in the state legislature. Bernstein also pays full tribute to lesser-known managers and often-anonymous workers who improvised methods of hacking the canal’s path through the wilderness. Two project engineers, Benjamin Wright and James Geddes, had been judges and surveyors before assuming their posts, but went on to eminent careers in their new field. Financing the canal proved equally novel, with New York State selling bonds to the public at large and even to foreign financial markets. Along with the canal’s well-known effects on the state and national economy (e.g., reducing the trip from Albany to Buffalo from 32 days to 5), Bernstein also highlights its social impact and larger national implications as the Midwest became tied to the free North rather than the slaveholding South in a vast commercial network.
One corner of the great American panorama enlarged to highlight its starry-eyed visionaries, political machinations, indefatigable ingenuity, and cockeyed optimism. (20 line drawings, not seen)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-393-05233-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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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