A marvelous reliving of history through the lives of two key players who were also devoted friends.
Exciting, well-wrought narrative strikes a terrific balance between George Washington’s stoic endeavors to galvanize a new American republic and the Marquis de Lafayette’s efforts to foment ideas of liberty and equality in despotic France.
The pair enjoyed a close, lifelong relationship, notes Gaines (Evening in the Palace of Reason, 2005, etc.). The elder general of the ragtag colonial forces first met the effusive, wild-eyed and very rich 19-year-old Frenchman in 1777 and had to figure out what to do with him. Steeped in Enlightenment ideals, each would be profoundly changed by the American war for liberty. Washington, the taciturn man of honor, lent his immense gravity and dignity to the founding years of the new republic. Lafayette fought courageously for the patriots, most notably at the siege of Yorktown, and he aggressively foisted on Louis XVI’s moribund court the ideals of inalienable human rights and self-government. Indeed, the French became necessary allies in the war against England, and Gaines notes that numerous first- and second-rank leaders of the French Revolution besides Lafayette were veterans of the American revolt and “carried home to their tottering monarchy the ideal of an Arcadian society free from want and despotism.” The author also stresses the importance of playwright and royal spy Beaumarchais, who pushed Louis to help arm the American rebels by setting up a secret trading house funded by the French government. Gaines maneuvers deftly between developments in America and France, from Washington’s camp at Valley Forge and reluctant first presidency to Lafayette’s intervention at the French court and the monstrous violence unleashed by the revolution.
A marvelous reliving of history through the lives of two key players who were also devoted friends.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-393-06138-3
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
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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