An illuminating portrait of the Civil War, seen from an unusual perspective.
Psychiatrist Lowry (Tarnished Eagles, not reviewed) and physician Welsh (Medicine/Univ. of Oklahoma) sift through the 80,000 court-martial transcripts in the National Archives to produce one of the few recent Civil War histories based on original research.
As with all court records, one never learns what really happened. The charges are often terrible (refusal to attend a dying patient, gross incompetence, mutilating a corpse), the prosecution is invariably damning, but the defense is always entirely convincing. In the end, the verdicts are unpredictable and only vaguely related to the testimony. Yet it doesn’t matter. These cases illuminate not only Civil War military life but the social, political, racial, sexual, and medical world of the mid–19th century. Although Lowry and Welsh divide their study by subject into 12 chapters, these divisions seem arbitrary because most of the trials dealt with multiple offenses. There are three basic categories of accusation. The first is largely made up of the traditional offenses found in court-martials through the ages (drunkenness, desertion, dereliction of duty). More titillating are charges particularly offensive to the Victorian age (consorting with lewd women, sex with a mare). Finally, and most peculiar, are accusations that strike us as trivial but were a deadly serious matter to the Civil War military—such as those brought against a dozen surgeons charged with eating with enlisted men. Snobbery was not the issue here: enlisted men ate at government expense during the Civil War, but officers were responsible for feeding themselves. Surgeons on trial for dining with their staff were suspected, often correctly, of freeloading off the taxpayer. No matter how lurid the subject, however, the verbatim account of a trial makes for tedious reading. Lowry and Welsh sensibly summarize each court-martial in their own words, interspersing them with quotes from the transcript and adding an expert, sometimes wryly amusing commentary.
An illuminating portrait of the Civil War, seen from an unusual perspective.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8117-1603-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
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
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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