Skilled storytelling drives an astute examination of a sad, complicated episode.
A successful effort to understand both sides of the struggle between a stubbornly unassimilated Pacific Northwest tribe and the white world that steadily encroached on its turf.
When Lewis and Clark encountered them in present-day Idaho in 1805, the Nez Perce found white men no mystery, writes West (American History/Univ. of Arkansas; The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado, 1998, etc.). The tribe already yearned for firearms and other attractive but scarce manufactured goods. For decades, they happily traded with trappers and travelers and welcomed missionaries. In the first of many misunderstandings, these religious proselytizers assumed the Nez Perce would discard their culture and become Christian farmers, while the tribe hoped missionaries would increase their worldly well-being. Since they considered themselves good people, the Nez Perce were puzzled efforts to persuade them they were miserable sinners. After 1840, they prospered trading with wagon trains heading for rich Oregon farmland. Most Nez Perce land was infertile, so another decade passed before settlers began moving in. Then followed years of intimidation and worthless treaties that steadily shrank the tribe’s territory. Ordered to a reservation outside their lands in 1877, many members refused and took their families, horses and cattle on a legendary 1,500-mile flight toward Canada. The author writes a gripping, nearly day-by-day account of that epic journey, during which hundreds died while outnumbered warriors repeatedly defeated the surprisingly incompetent U.S. Army. Ironically, their flight and bitter surrender produced a wave of admiration across America for the Nez Perce. Their purported leader, Chief Joseph, became a national hero, but no one wanted to give back their land, so the tribe returned to its reservation. Histories of American Indians rarely end happily.
Skilled storytelling drives an astute examination of a sad, complicated episode.Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-19-513675-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2009
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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