A riveting Civil War history giving politics and combat equal attention.
An engrossing history of the final gasps of the Civil War, a year in which “Americans mourned their fathers and brothers and sons but also the way their lives used to be, the people they used to be, the innocence they had lost.”
Journalist and historian Gwynne (The Perfect Pass: American Genius and the Reinvention of Football, 2016, etc.) begins in May 1864 with the Confederacy shrunken and impoverished but with no intention of surrendering. Aware that their armies were outmatched, Southern leaders kept their spirits up with a fantasy. If they could hold out until the November election, they believed, Lincoln would lose, and a Democratic administration would end the war, leaving the Confederacy intact. This was not entirely unreasonable. The July 1863 triumphs at Gettysburg and Vicksburg were ancient history. War weariness was common; Lincoln himself believed he would lose the election, and Northern media poured out invective. Everyone had high hopes when Ulysses Grant took command in March. Gwynne emphasizes that his strategy—unrelenting attacks on all fronts—was a war winner, but initial results were discouraging. Sherman stalled in front of Atlanta, and Grant couldn’t defeat Lee, although, unlike previous generals, he kept trying. As the author writes, by “the summer of 1864 the North was bitterly divided, heartily sick of the war, and headed into an election that would give full voice to all of that smoldering dissent.” Then, as fall approached, matters improved. Atlanta fell, Philip Sheridan eliminated the persistent threat to Washington in the Shenandoah Valley, rival candidates self-destructed, and Lincoln won reelection in a landslide. Five months of war remained, but the Union won all the battles. A consummate researcher, Gwynne has done his homework and is not shy with opinions. He especially admires Sherman, a mediocre general but an insightful thinker who taught that war had no positive value; it was misery pure and simple. He also punctures persistent myths, especially that of the great Appomattox reconciliation. Lee, Grant, and a few generals shook hands, but Union forces celebrated wildly, and Confederates fumed and stormed off.
A riveting Civil War history giving politics and combat equal attention.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1622-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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 Yorkerstaff 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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