An outstanding supplement to the many conventional histories of the American Revolution, Jennings's history offers both an...
A detailed account of the less idealistic economic and political motivations that inspired the American Revolution.
Respected and controversial historian Jennings (Benjamin Franklin, Politician, 1996, etc.) again subjects the conventions surrounding the creation of the US to intense scrutiny. He argues that early historians gloss over the complexities of the Revolutionary War in favor of creating idealistic and romantic revolutionary figures: for instance, George Washington's shady manipulation of the courts to secure himself vast tracts of land disappears when traditional historians cast him as a righteous and virtuous republican founder. By exposing the hypocrisy inherent in many of these national myths, the author documents an American Revolution where personal economic and political aspirations fuel secessionist fervor. This transforms the celebrated rhetoric about freedom, liberty, and democracy into war propaganda for inspiring popular support. To advance this claim, Jennings scrutinizes colonial dealings in slave trade and Native American affairs and concludes that the revolution, while it freed the colonies from British rule, did not bring the virtuous democracy of our traditional histories into being—it merely created a new white ruling class. Therefore, the American Revolution, while worthy of study, is just one in a series of small steps toward a more perfect liberty. Many revisionist histories fail because they support an ideology at the expense of objectivity. Jennings's account, however, succeeds through a fair and honest reevaluation that not only sheds light on commonly neglected areas, but also provokes thought about uncomfortable aspects of our heritage.
An outstanding supplement to the many conventional histories of the American Revolution, Jennings's history offers both an objective account of the conflict and challenging insights about historical distortion.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-521-66255-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Cambridge Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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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