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LINCOLN IN AMERICAN MEMORY

Peterson (History/Univ. of Virginia; The Jefferson Image in the American Mind, not reviewed) uses the life and legend of Abraham Lincoln to show the general reader how ``history'' is made. It is not a pretty sight. Although professional historians may find little to surprise them here, armchair historians are quite likely to register shock at the consistent disregard for truth among portrayers of Lincoln. Hagiographers were just as likely to be inaccurate and to make the facts fit theories as were Lincoln-bashers. Perhaps the kings of hagiography are John George Nicolay and John Milton Hay, whose 10- volume biography (published in 1890) bore the imprimatur of Abe's family. The dectractors include the more recent psychobiographers, such as Dwight G. Anderson. Somewhere in between is the poet turned Lincoln biographer Carl Sandburg. Peterson comments that ``in constructing his portrait, Sandburg used whatever came to hand without much regard to authenticity.'' But Peterson finds only a few who search for the middle ground, and they stand out memorably from the crowd: Frederick Douglass, whose ``gnawing doubt'' about Lincoln's motives for emancipating the slaves informed his ambivalent speech at an 1876 ceremony meant to honor the assassinated president; and muckracking journalist Ida Tarbell, who, three decades after Lincoln's death, made a serious attempt to write the biographical truth after so many published lies. The organization of the book—mostly chronological but sometimes thematic—makes the going tough in spots, and Peterson is less judgmental than perhaps he ought to be regarding the corruption of research that has led to so many false portrayals of Lincoln. On the other hand, thinking readers will find it refreshing to reach their own judgments of the Lincoln treatments chronicled in a mostly fine piece of historiography.

Pub Date: May 1, 1994

ISBN: 0-19-506570-0

Page Count: 480

Publisher: Oxford Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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