Less dramatic than the author’s previous work, but full of vigorous prose and dynamic stories about the period immediately...
The author of two books on the Lincoln assassination takes another look at the aftermath.
Swanson (Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer, 2006, etc.) focuses on two chains of events from the spring of 1865: the hunt for fleeing Confederate president Jefferson Davis, and the elaborate arrangements to return Lincoln’s body to Illinois for burial. Davis, informed by Robert E. Lee that his troops could no longer defend Richmond, sent his wife and their four children to safety, then followed a day later, taking his cabinet and much of the Confederate treasury with him. While details on Davis’s flight are sparse, Swanson’s other narrative gives him plenty of material, beginning with Lincoln’s visit to fallen Richmond and following events up to the night of his assassination. The author then alternates between Davis’s harried journey and the arrangements for Lincoln’s funeral, the most elaborate of its time. Davis’s desperate and little-documented attempt to hold his defeated country together stands in striking contrast to the painstaking planning of the national farewell to the fallen Lincoln, who was effectively elevated to the status of a national saint. Most striking is the spread of the story that Davis, when captured, was wearing women’s clothing, which Swanson vigorously refutes. The latter part of the book, after Lincoln’s interment in Springfield, Ill., follows Davis, first imprisoned as a traitor, then freed after two years to prevent him from becoming a martyr to the Southern cause. His subsequent career was at first rocky, as he was forced for the first time in his life to work for a living. Eventually he was able to retire, thanks to a benefactor who willed him his Mississippi home where he lived until his death in 1889. In his final years, Davis became a living symbol of the lost cause. Swanson colorfully renders both parts of his narrative, although the details of Lincoln’s funeral procession become repetitious. However, Davis’s later life has been largely overlooked, and this is a useful corrective.
Less dramatic than the author’s previous work, but full of vigorous prose and dynamic stories about the period immediately following the end of the Civil War.Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-123378-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
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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