by Tom Clavin ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 22, 2024
Clavin’s shoot-’em-up yarns don’t break much new ground, but Western buffs will enjoy them all the same.
Of Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, and other bad actors on the Western frontier.
The glory days of the cowboy bandit lasted from about 1875 to 1905. Their turf extended from Canada to Mexico, “connected,” pop historian Clavin writes, “by what came to be known as the Outlaw Trail.” In this territory, Clavin’s heroes and antiheroes plied their trade, a particularly favorite spot being a plateau that bordered Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado, allowing for easy escape from one jurisdiction to another. Clavin’s cast of characters includes any number of figures who are well known to Western buffs, including Charles Siringo, the Pinkerton agent who, though he would later turn on the firm (and it him), spent years chasing after the Butch Cassidy-Sundance Kid gang; the hired gun Tom Horn, who cleaned out plenty of outlaws from their hiding places in the mountains, only to cross over into outlawry himself (and, notes Clavin, who wrote letters warning his intended victims that he was coming for them—“perhaps he still believed in fair play”); and the very bad Kid Curry, a stone killer who eluded capture while meting out death on lawmen and innocents alike for years. Some of Clavin’s Western history is by the numbers, but to his credit he places the action in the larger context of social change: Butch and Sundance disappeared into the wilds of South America—and have never been definitively found in all the years since—because, Clavin writes, the Wild West had run out of time, while “the few outlaws who remained…were gradually driven or drifted out by bolder and more numerous lawmen, replaced by ranchers glad for new territory.”
Clavin’s shoot-’em-up yarns don’t break much new ground, but Western buffs will enjoy them all the same.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9781250282408
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
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 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
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by Ron Chernow ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 13, 2025
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
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A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
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