A collection of 35 essays by members of the Society of American Historians that help to restore the heroic figure’s just proportions for the benefit of our too-cynical age. Ware (History/Radcliffe Coll., Still Missing: Amelia Earhart and the Search for Modern Feminism, 1993) defines a hero as anyone who leads by courageous example. For instance, we read in Tom Wicker’s contribution, —Henry Knox’s Wilderness Epic,— about the incredible 1775—76 journey of Knox, who dragged tons of captured British artillery overland and across rivers, exhorted his worn men from Fort Ticonderoga to Boston, and eventually caused the British army to evacuate the city. Also chronicled are the doings of religious martyrs and former slaves, suffragists, publishers, and other reformers. Of equal note are the seemingly much less zingy backroom labors of librarian J.C.M. Hanson, who standardized cataloguing practices at the Library of Congress and the University of Chicago library. Observes his present-day champion, contributing essayist Neil Harris, who teaches history at Chicago, —Librarians of the day regarded issues like the proper entry of a British nobleman’s name or the capitalization of common nouns in German —as something on which their consciences would permit no compromise.— But Hanson was able to encourage harmony.— Also unexpected is Stephen Jay Gould’s account of the extraordinary Ohio-born deaf baseball player William Ellsworth —Dummy— Hoy (1862—961): though no more than five feet five inches tall, Hoy was a great center-fielder who slipped into the game by chance after a brief career as a cobbler. One of Hoy’s more minor yet still ingenious accomplishments: the invention of a —unique doorbell arrangement— involving a knob, pulled by the caller, that —released a lead ball which rolled down a wooden chute and then fell off onto the floor with a thud. When it hit the floor [inside, Hoy and his wife] felt vibrations through their feet, and they knew somebody was at the door.— Unlikely heroes may be the best kind.
Pub Date: Sept. 24, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-84375-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1998
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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