Another winner of early American history from a renowned practitioner.
A history of three of the Founding Fathers who fought relentlessly “for nothing less than the dignity, equality, and rights of man in America and throughout Europe and England.”
Except for stressing the revolutionary credentials of his subjects—Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and James Monroe—Ferling (Emeritus, History/Univ. of West Georgia; Whirlwind: The American Revolution and the War that Won It, 2015, etc.) delivers solid, conventional biographies, so readers searching for lives of the Founders can kill three birds with this one stone. All three men supported rule of the common man, but only Paine could not be accused of hypocrisy. He hated slavery and the seizure of Indian lands and never had much money, but his later attacks on George Washington and organized religion made him so unpopular that some Americans have never considered him a true Founding Father. Members of the Virginia aristocracy, Jefferson and Monroe opposed slavery in theory but treated their own slaves poorly. Jefferson is well-known for proclaiming that an ideal nation consists of small, independent farmers whose representatives would rule with a light hand. What he meant was that these sturdy yeomen would elect responsible gentry like himself who knew how to govern large groups of citizens. He was most unhappy when the electorate turned to crude, less-educated types more to their taste—e.g., Andrew Jackson. Mostly a follower of Jefferson and president from 1817 to 1825, Monroe is the least known of the three, so readers will find his biography particularly illuminating. Ferling matured during the turbulent 1960s when a school of historians believed that revolutionaries were cool and that traditional elitists like Washington and Adams lacked a je ne sais quoi. Though he has moved beyond this camp, a trace remains in this excellently opinionated history.
Another winner of early American history from a renowned practitioner.Pub Date: May 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63286-209-9
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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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