A moving, accessible portrayal of Lincoln as a deeply humble, strangely physical presence who spoke in oracular parables.
In a scholarly examination of the Emancipation Proclamation, Masur (American Studies and History/Rutgers Univ.; The Civil War: A Concise History, 2011, etc.) reveals the intensive intellectual development and political debate behind President Lincoln’s resolve.
The Proclamation was actually heralded by a preliminary document floated cautiously on September 22, 1862, announcing that in 100 days—Jan. 1, 1863—the president would proclaim the freeing of any slaves within the states “in rebellion against the United States,” among other important assertions intended to test the waters. Masur revisits the president’s growing sense of solemn moral responsibility, in spite of being battered by criticism from all sides. Prior to this time, runaway slaves were already being declared by the Union military as “contraband of war,” codified into law by the Confiscation Act of 1861, while John Charles Frémont, as commander of the Department of the West, had declared his own bold emancipation proclamation for Missouri. Yet Lincoln hesitated for legal reasons, uncertain about a proclamation’s constitutionality; he feared the effects on the army, on the border (slave) states of Missouri, Kentucky, Delaware and Maryland, which might be pushed to join the Confederacy, and on the slaves themselves—would emancipation foment insurrection against whites? During these 100 days, Lincoln essentially took the country’s measure and found that many abolitionists felt relief and could finally express their views; soldiers often wrote how the war experience turned them against slavery; and if the U.S. didn’t pass emancipation, the South might have first, in order to curry England’s support. Moreover, the exigencies of winning the war demanded action. Masur carefully delineates the differences inherent in the final Proclamation, such as the elimination of mention of colonization of blacks and inclusion of blacks into the military.
A moving, accessible portrayal of Lincoln as a deeply humble, strangely physical presence who spoke in oracular parables.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-674-06690-8
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
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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