A masterful addition to the crowded shelf of books about Antietam.
The September 1862 battle recounted through the lives of nine participants.
Historian/biographer Budiansky reminds readers that Robert E. Lee did not assume command until a year after hostilities began. During that time Confederate President Jefferson Davis, aware that the North possessed far more resources, had adopted a defensive policy, certain that to win the South had only to emulate Washington’s successful strategy during the Revolution: avoid outright losses and make the war unacceptably expensive for the enemy. By the time Lee took over, this strategy was working, according to Budiansky and most contemporary observers. No deep thinker, Lee assumed that generals attack, a disastrous policy for a weaker adversary, though spectacularly successful at first because he faced incompetent opposition epitomized by Union general George McClellan. Disorganized and vainglorious, McClellan showed a maddening reluctance to attack and vastly exaggerated the size of Lee’s army. He could have annihilated Lee at Antietam but bungled it. No scholar has yet explained why, when a copy of Lee's plans fell into McClellan’s hands, he did nothing for days while Lee frantically recalled his units and then, still outnumbered, fended off McClellan’s confused, piecemeal attack, which produced equal slaughter on both sides. Budiansky chooses equally compelling supporting figures. Physician Jonathan Letterman worked to reform the shameful Union medical care system. Wounded repeatedly, Oliver Wendell Holmes barely survived three years as a junior officer and recorded his painful descent from dreams of glory to squalor and death. Alexander Gardner shocked the public with photographs of the dead, though few showed corpses decapitated, disemboweled, missing limbs, or partially devoured by marauding pigs. Also, Budiansky notes, Gardner staged some photos, moving around corpses “to conform to some idealized representation of death.” Buttressed by four additional, equally cogent portraits, these masterful mini-biographies give the famous battle a compelling human face.
A masterful addition to the crowded shelf of books about Antietam.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9781324035756
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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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