From battles to international relations, an outstanding introduction to the American Revolution.
The American Revolution, emphasizing contributions from European powers.
Ferling, author of 15 previous histories of the Revolutionary War period, strains mightily to find a new approach, and the result is an excellent history of the run-up and battles of the American Revolution with more than the usual diversions describing how other nations reacted. He reminds readers that France suffered badly in the Seven Years’ War, which ended in 1763, losing battles, ships, and colonies. Yearning for revenge, its leaders perked up when the American colonies rebelled, and the colonists themselves, in the form of the Continental Congress, yearned for France to join them. Ferling emphasizes that America’s ultimate victory required massive European aid in the form of arms, trained soldiers, sailors, money, and even gunpowder. Since well before the Declaration of Independence, the colonies were importing supplies from France, Spain, and the Netherlands. Still awash in debt from the Seven Years’ War, France had no interest in another, but it reconsidered after America’s spectacular 1778 victory at Saratoga and soon persuaded Spain, which had also suffered in 1763, to join. The consequences may surprise readers. Almost immediately London transferred one third of its colonial army to Canada and the West Indies and thereafter gave priority to war with its traditional enemy. America’s ecstasy at France’s entry soon evaporated. A French fleet arrived to support a massive combined operation that fizzled, after which the fleet sailed off, and the war entered a painful three-year stalemate, during which Washington took little action until the French returned and made the Yorktown campaign possible. Scholars have not ignored European participation, but Ferling writes better than most of them and pays more attention than academics to the campaigns and commanders.
From battles to international relations, an outstanding introduction to the American Revolution.Pub Date: April 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781639730155
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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 Yorkerstaff 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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