Bestselling historian and novelist Fleming (Remember the Morning, p. 1049) offers a solid popular history of America's era of unrest, revolution, and constitutional government (176389) in this lavishly illustrated companion volume to a three-part PBS series airing in November. How to make a familiar story into something new? Fleming starts from an old but often forgotten historical perspective—the idea that individuals matter—by personifying English folly and American resistance in two men named George. In contrast to histories centered more on American responses, Fleming stresses the role of the young King George III, who alienated able ministers such as William Pitt, sought out toadies to head his government, and rammed confiscatory tax (and increasingly anti-American) policies through an unrepresentative, corrupt Parliament. In contrast, the drive for American liberty was spearheaded by the incorruptible George Washington, who accepted civilian control of the military (despite his constant complaints about Congress) and continually renounced opportunities to become a Cromwellian dictator. Although Fleming includes an affectionate portrait of Benjamin Franklin, he concentrates his account on military events, with gripping details on key battles (e.g., when falling sleet ruined much of his men's gunpowder just before the battle of Trenton, Washington gave the order to use the bayonet). Numerous sidebars highlight such matters as daily life in the late colonial period (only 200 out of 3,500 practicing doctors in America on the eve of revolution had medical degrees), the evolution of ``Yankee Doodle,'' the war's high casualty rate, and the long-neglected role of such racial/ethnic groups as the Irish, Jews, and blacks (a group that by 1779 comprised almost 15 percent of America's army). The book's one irony, given its title, is that Fleming devotes little attention to the differing conceptions of liberty throughout the colonies. Lacking in analytical depth, but packed with narrative insight into personalities and often delicious minutiae. (300 color illustrations) (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection; History Book Club selection)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-670-87021-8
Page Count: 394
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997
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 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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