A pleasant but uninspired collection of vignettes about the history of the West that offers nothing new. Noted Western author Brown (When the Century Was Young, 1993, etc.) serves up a new volume detailing the life and history of the American frontier. The material is culled from the text of three previous picture books—Fighting Indians of the West, Trail Driving Days, and The Settlers' West—that he co-authored in the 1940s and 1950s with the late Martin Schmitt (editor of General George Crook: His Autobiography, 1946); this version also includes several photographs from the earlier volumes. Always sensitive to the long, losing struggle of the Indians, Brown movingly depicts Sioux chief Red Cloud's successful war to close the Bozeman Trail (including the so-called Fetterman Massacre) and Cheyenne chief Black Kettle's unsuccessful attempts to keep the peace, shattered by the Sand Creek and Washita massacres. But the white West is also covered, with glimpses of life on the great cattle drives and of the boomtowns at the end of the beef trails—towns like Abilene, Tex., and Wichita, Kans., which thrived as rail centers for the shipment of cattle. The mythmaking process that shaped the West of popular imagination is also dear to Brown's heart, and he brings into focus the impact of tall tales (Paul Bunyan, etc.), Wild West shows (Buffalo Bill, et al.), rodeos, Billy the Kid's inflated legend, and The Virginian, a novel by Harvard-educated Philadelphia lawyer Owen Wister that supplanted real-life cowboy Charlie Siringo's much more authentic A Texas Cow Boy in the public imagination. Brown writes in an engaging style, but our view of frontier history has changed a lot in 40 years. Rather than this recycled material, itself seduced by the myths it seeks to expose, better to read Brown's own Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-02-517421-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
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 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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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