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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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