Certainly enticing stuff for buffs of things southwestern, but more so to readers with an eye to the ironies and paradoxes...
A close look at one of the most bloody, mysterious episodes in the history of what’s now the Southwest.
On a single August day in 1680, Pueblo Indian nations throughout New Mexico and into present-day Arizona rebelled against their Spanish rulers, coordinating their attacks over hundreds of miles with astonishing precision. “No one in New Mexico was hated more bitterly than its thirty-three Franciscan friars,” writes historian/adventurer Roberts (Four Against the Arctic, 2003, etc.), “and so the cruelest executions were reserved for them.” Other Spaniards, soldiers and settlers, didn’t have it much better, and, after having waited out a siege at Santa Fe, they withdrew from northern New Mexico. The Spanish governor swore that he would avenge the deaths of the 380 Spanish citizens who had fallen to the Pueblos, which he called “a lamentable tragedy, such as has never before happened in the world.” His bosses were not so convinced of his abilities; they relieved the governor of his post, and the Spanish stayed away for a dozen years until embarking on a bloody campaign of reconquest. Nobody much talks about the events of 1680 these days, Roberts allows—strangely, given how transformative they were. Indeed, he adds, Indian peoples do not discuss them, at least not in public, which puzzles Roberts. “If the Jemez elders still knew exactly what had happened in, say, a.d. 1270, as their people made their way from the north and west to their present heartland, why might they not retain a comparably rich story of what had happened in 1680?” Why, indeed, and Roberts’s efforts to resolve that particular mystery make up the best part of a sometimes plodding, sometimes self-indulgent narrative, which mixes archaeology, history, and anthropology into a kind of you-are-there travelogue.
Certainly enticing stuff for buffs of things southwestern, but more so to readers with an eye to the ironies and paradoxes of history.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-5516-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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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