The Civil War's western theater is the focus of this vivid history by the author of Forrest Gump (1986). A southerner whose great-grandfather was involved in the events depicted, Groom focuses on the Confederate side of the conflict and the rebels' last great offensive push to drive Federal forces from their soil. The center of the story is Southern general John Bell Hood. A flamboyant and aggressive leader, Hood fought at Antietam and Gettysburg, lost a leg at Chickamauga, and was for a time presumed dead, but he went on to become a lieutenant general. When Sherman, on his march to the sea, ordered the expulsion of the populace from Atlanta, Hood fired off a searing series of letters to his former colleague, challenging Sherman to fight and declaring that it was better to ``die a thousand deaths'' than to live under Yankee tyranny. Abandoning the defensive posture of his predecessor in command of Georgia, he vigorously attacked Sherman but was repulsed and forced to retire to Atlanta. Hood again suffered defeat at Franklin, Tenn., where he was so moved by the carnage that he broke down and wept, but he kept on coming. He moved on Nashville in a last desperate flourish, but on December 16, 1864, his forces were routed by Union troops under General George Thomas. At his own request, Hood was then relieved of his command. Five days later, Sherman captured Savannah, and the last gasp of Southern offensive was over. With the skill of a mature novelist and an eye for detail, Groom manages to imbue Hood's futile and awful efforts with the dignity and nobility of medieval chivalry. Highly readable and intensely evocative, a fine addition to the growing body of literature about the western war, once largely a forgotten footnote to the ``real'' action in the East. (photos, maps, not seen) (First printing of 40,000; $50,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-87113-591-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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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