A well-researched and -written account of an often overlooked figure in the history of the Indian Wars.
Sharply honed life of the only American Indian leader to definitively beat the United States in war, short-lived though the defeat might have been.
Popular military historians Drury and Clavin (Last Men Out: The True Story of America's Heroic Final Hours in Vietnam, 2011, etc.) offer a battle-and-skirmish account of Sioux leader Red Cloud’s war on the whites who invaded the Great Plains, though their narrative is strong on ethnohistorical matters as well. When a white officer sputtered “Horseshit” against Red Cloud’s claim that the Sioux had an ancestral claim to the Black Hills, for instance, the authors are able to explain that, be that as it may, the Sioux had developed an emergence story to back up their case—one that, as it happened, had its first mention on the Sioux calendar “the summer before America’s Founding Fathers signed the Declaration of Independence.” Drury and Clavin frame their story with what has been called the Fetterman Massacre (here, better put, the Fetterman Fight), in 1866, when an unfortunate Army officer led his command into a trap that led to their deaths, but they pack it with details taken from many episodes in the early history of Sioux relations with the whites, as well as with other tribes. They credit Red Cloud with forming a powerful alliance of peoples, among them the Cheyenne and Shoshone, the only way the Indians could resist white encroachment into their homeland. Even so, as the authors note, when Red Cloud was invited to Washington to sign a peace treaty and was taken to a federal arsenal to see the assembled weaponry available to his enemy, he recognized that the days of his people’s suzerainty were numbered, even as he continued to mount “the most impressive campaign in the annals of Indian warfare,” which lasted from 1866 to 1868.
A well-researched and -written account of an often overlooked figure in the history of the Indian Wars.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-5466-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
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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