An academic account that respectfully resurrects long-dead voices from a people who still have a lot to tell us.
A history scholar collects first-person accounts of the history of the Cherokee people, revealing a troubled but proud history through the eyes of its women.
In her spirited and well-sourced collection, Johnston (History and American Studies/Eckerd Coll.; My Father’s War: Fighting with the Buffalo Soldiers in World War II, 2012, etc.) unfolds history through the voices of people who remembered terrible events ranging from the cataclysmic effects of legislation like the Dawes Act to the ethnic cleansing of the Trail of Tears to the bloody cost of the American Civil War, finally reaching the rejuvenation of these proud people under the leadership of great chiefs like Wilma Mankiller. Beginning with the Cherokee creation myths, the book moves quickly to examine the flawed observations of Western explorers starting in the early 17th century. The great crisis arrived in the form of the United States government’s “civilization program,” as captured by the Cherokee woman Wahnenauhi (“Over-There-They-Just-Arrived-With-It”): “They could almost hear the reproaches and wailings of the dear dead as they were leaving. How must these Chiefs decide for their people? No wonder it seemed that Despair in its thickest blackness had settled down and unfolded in gloom this assemblage of brave and true hearted Patriots.” Johnston excerpts some of the accounts from a Works Projects Administration program in the 1920s to capture the history of the Native American people of North America. In one, a woman remembers her mother telling her the story of a soldier who murdered a baby who wouldn’t stop crying. The book also reveals how the rather warped European attitudes about topics like sex, power and responsibility changed the Cherokee people, deeply diminishing the power of women under challenges from a white, patriarchal society. Only in the 20th century have women finally been able to reassert themselves and take their fair and equal role as leaders of their culture.
An academic account that respectfully resurrects long-dead voices from a people who still have a lot to tell us.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-89587-599-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: John F. Blair
Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
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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