Beautifully organized and accessibly presented history for all readers.
A clear, authoritative, well-organized look at the messy Colonial march toward revolution and self-rule.
In this broad history, eminent historian Taylor (History/Univ. of Virginia; The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832, 2013, etc.), who has won the Pulitzer Prize (twice), the National Book Award, and the Bancroft Prize, underscores the myriad complex facets to the rebellion against British authority starting in the mid-18th century, especially the westward thrust to settle newly won Indian territory. Between 1754 and 1763, at the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War, the British and their colonists had conquered French Canada and claimed the West as far as the Mississippi River. The colonists naturally assumed they would “share in the imperial fruits of victory,” but instead, the British authorities aimed to exert greater control over the Colonies, restricting speculation west of the Appalachians by proclamation and extracting much-needed revenue from them to pay for the costly war. Considering themselves “free-born Englishmen,” the colonists hoped for a great partnership with the mother country, but they were treated as “distant and wayward inferiors.” Compounding the tension, notes the author, was the vacuum of civil government left by the British in the lands to the West between restive Colonial settlers and the resentful Indians. Taylor superbly emphasizes the key role of slaves in the revolutionary period—namely, the contradiction of the colonists’ claiming the language of liberty while possessing slaves (to the ridicule by Britons)—and the role of women in spurring and aiding the rebels. Moreover, the author impressively relays the sense of torn loyalties and how the revolutionary associations empowered the common man to step up and participate. He moves through the Revolution itself to the complicated aftermath of partisan politics, exacerbated by the global conflict ignited by the French Revolution. His final chapters on “Partisans” and “Legacies” delineate the first sticky political schisms and the vast postwar challenges in terms of culture, gender, race, and economy.
Beautifully organized and accessibly presented history for all readers.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-393-08281-4
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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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