An entertaining narrative of events that have received more thorough treatment elsewhere.
In his debut, Washington Post assistant foreign editor Englund takes a close look at a month “that wrenched America toward a new course."
This was the month immediately before Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to take America into World War I. Wilson, the book's central figure, was initially determined to keep America neutral but was also relentlessly drawn to the conclusion that escalating German attacks on American shipping required the nation to join the hostilities. Early in the month, the first Russian revolution broke out and the hapless Czar Nicholas II abdicated, thus eliminating the embarrassing prospect of Americans fighting for democracy alongside an absolute despotism. Supporting players in the drama include Theodore Roosevelt, fulminating for a war he would not be permitted to join; Jeannette Rankin, the first American congresswoman, who wanted to focus on obtaining suffrage for women but first had to decide how to vote on going to war; H.L. Mencken, the Germanophile journalist who spent March in Cuba covering a farcical failed revolution; and James Reese Europe, a pioneering jazz and military band leader. Englund is an accomplished storyteller, and he well captures the spirit of the time: in Russia, where the exhilaration and confusion as the nation stumbled toward a humiliating separate peace with Germany and a second revolution; in America, full of anxiety and anticipation as the country slid reluctantly into war. The author also ably portrays the unfortunate misperceptions about emerging Russian democracy. Englund’s self-imposed time frame proves constraining, however. The events of March were, of course, the culmination of earlier developments that require and receive full explanation, particularly the resumption by Germany of unrestricted submarine warfare and the now-famous Zimmermann telegram. The coverage of Rankin's congressional debut effectively displays the distressing split that the prospect of war caused in the ranks of the suffragists, but the adventures of Mencken and James Europe seem of only tangential relevance.
An entertaining narrative of events that have received more thorough treatment elsewhere.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-393-29208-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
HISTORY | MODERN | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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
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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