A page-turner that delivers an eye-opening history of the American Revolution from a different perspective, as well as...
A history of how the American revolt of 1775 evolved into a worldwide conflict.
“Everyone knows that the first shot of this war was fired between soldiers on Lexington Common in 1775,” writes highly acclaimed British naval historian Willis (In the Hour of Victory: The Royal Navy at War in the Age of Nelson, 2014, etc.), “but…the last was fired between warships at the battle of Cuddalore in the Bay of Bengal on 20 June 1783.” The author takes nearly 500 pages to describe all this, but that includes many little-known distant campaigns, and readers can expect a thoroughly satisfying experience. Willis emphasizes that the Continental Congress’ October 1775 resolution to create a navy marked the point of no return. Raising a militia was an ancient colonial right, so George Washington’s army was technically legal. Raising a navy, however, was unprecedented. The resulting ragtag fleet never challenged the British Royal Navy, but showing the flag in foreign ports proclaimed that the rebellion was a going concern—and needed help. These ships—and those of 12 naval colonies—moved troops and equipment and harassed the enemy, but privateers inflicted the greatest pain, capturing thousands of merchant vessels during the years of the conflict. It was France and its allies that turned the tide, and Willis delivers an expert account of how they made independence a reality, but at considerable sacrifice. Spectacularly incompetent in America, Britain performed well almost everywhere else. Peace left Britain minus the American Colonies but with impressive gains in India, the Mediterranean, and the Caribbean. France, on the other hand, was bankrupt.
A page-turner that delivers an eye-opening history of the American Revolution from a different perspective, as well as surprising details of what Willis maintains was the greatest war of the age of sail.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-393-23992-8
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
HISTORY | MILITARY | UNITED STATES | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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