Despite the pop-history trimmings, a solid résumé of everything anyone would want to know about this undeservedly neglected...
Competent biography of Washington’s talented young protégé, who commanded the artillery throughout the American Revolution and served as the nation’s first Secretary of War.
When hostilities broke out, Knox (1750–1806) was a Boston bookseller and enthusiastic member of the local militia, reports Puls (Samuel Adams: Father of the American Revolution, 2006). Most of his knowledge about artillery came from the books in his shop, but that didn’t stop him from offering his services to Washington, who arrived after the Battle of Bunker Hill to take charge of the siege of Boston. Knox entered the war during the winter of 1775-76, when he directed the transport of several dozen immensely heavy cannons from Fort Ticonderoga across 200 miles of frozen wilderness to Boston. Their punishing firepower persuaded the British to evacuate. Directing artillery and engineering forces throughout the war, Knox served as Washington’s essential can-do man. The general ordered a three-pronged attack across the Delaware on Christmas Day, 1776, but only Knox’s prong successfully ferried 2,400 men and 18 field guns across the ice-clogged river to the Jersey shore. In the interim between independence and the first presidential election, he served the Continental Congress as Secretary of War. His proposal for a national military academy was greeted with admiration but did not bear fruit as West Point until 1802. As Washington’s Secretary of War, he worked hard to professionalize the nation’s minuscule Army. When Congress finally agreed to build warships in 1794, Knox educated himself on the subject and then made brilliant technical decisions that created a small but technically advanced U.S. Navy. Readers will encounter few surprises in this portrait of an uncontroversial figure, and some may be annoyed by the author’s attempts to enliven matters with fictionalized dialogue and confident pronouncements on his subject’s inner thoughts.
Despite the pop-history trimmings, a solid résumé of everything anyone would want to know about this undeservedly neglected not-quite founding father.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4039-8427-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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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