A well-composed yet ultimately unexciting account of the War of 1812 battle by the author of the National Book Award—winning three-volume biography of Andrew Jackson. After providing the briefest of backgrounds to cover the origins of the War of 1812 and the initial events of the conflict, Remini (professor emeritus, Univ. of Illinois, Chicago) quickly jumps in to tell the tale of the battle that turned the tide of the war and served as one of the most important military victories in the history of the early American republic—the battle that pitted a motley American force of militiamen, pirates, and woodsmen from Kentucky against the British veterans of Waterloo in the bayous outside of New Orleans. Though his descriptions of the battle are rich with detail, there’s little here to bring the events into a human scope. Remini writes classic history in the “great men, great events” style, but this effort is missing flavor; it’s altogether devoid of the social particulars that are some of the most compelling aspects of well-rounded histories. Despite Remini’s desire, as discussed in the preface, to go beyond the limitations of biography and recount one momentous event, there’s scant evidence that this account is much more than a chapter in the life of Jackson. Remini emphasizes the significance of the participation of the pirate Jean Lafitte in the American defense of the city; however, he then offers only a fleeting glimpse of this. More glaring is his lack of attention to the slaves who fought on both sides of the battle and to the stories of the backwoodsmen whose military prowess is acclaimed, yet of whom we know nothing. A stirring narrative of a battle, but not much more. (History Book Club selection)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-670-88551-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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