An overlong but well-researched history that shows how the War of 1812 created America’s final separation from England.
Randall (Emeritus, History/Champlain Coll.; Ethan Allen: His Life and Times, 2014, etc.) elaborates on the war that shouldn’t have been fought and that no one won or lost.
The War of 1812 was the culmination of a decadeslong trade war between England and the United States. The British colonies existed only to supply raw materials and purchase British goods. The author begins in 1759, at the end of the Seven Years’ War. With the expulsion of the French from the Americas, settlers were ready to move west only to find England denying them access to lands and the fur trade. Regulations poured out of London under George III, determining what America could and could not trade. This was sufficient cause for a revolution, but the problems continued after independence. While Britain fought Napoleon and his forces in Europe, America determined to remain neutral. The British began taking American ships, claiming they were transporting war materiel and impressing English “deserters.” Randall’s lengthy background information causes the early narrative to plod, but it does help to expose the futility of the war. Britain actually repealed orders for embargoes and ship confiscations, but word didn’t arrive in Washington until a month after war was declared. Neither side was prepared, nor could they afford a war. With the fall of Napoleon, the need for impressing sailors, and the true cause of the war, had ended; America had little naval might to counter Britain’s vast armada. When it came down to the fighting, American military leaders were woefully inadequate. The British union with Tecumseh and his confederacy tilted the scales at first toward the English. Even major successes could not unite the states, especially in the anti-war Northeast. It was only the burning of Washington by the savage George Cockburn that united the country with a will to fight.
An overlong but well-researched history that shows how the War of 1812 created America’s final separation from England.Pub Date: June 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-11183-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
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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