An absorbing account of a quarter century of conflict: the Apache resistance to the ``White Eye'' settlers encroaching on their Arizona lands. Clashes between US troops and Apaches broke out in 1861, but it was only after the Civil War that the army turned its attention fully to these skirmishes in the Southwest. Roberts (Jean Stafford: A Biography, 1988, etc.) sifts through contradictory memoirs and letters from the two sides to present a balanced version of why peace in the region was continually shattered—and why the outnumbered Apache were continually able to drive white settlers to hysteria. Complaints about Indian atrocities were sometimes valid, Roberts explains, but the Apache chief Cochise was often accused of crimes that he couldn't have committed. Meanwhile, the Apaches felt betrayed when agreements with troops were cavalierly broken by Indian land agents. Roberts's narrative is considerably enhanced by its briskly written portraits—including those of the fierce, and fiercely honest, Cochise; of General George Crook, the army's best Indian fighter, who found the key to ending the Apaches' flight (to catch an Apache, use Apache scouts); of John Clum, an Indian land agent whom the Apaches nicknamed ``Turkey Gobbler'' for his arrogance; Lozen, the woman warrior who could equal any man in riding and shooting; and Juh, the chief afflicted with a terrible stutter but gifted with military genius. And, above all, there is the presence of Geronimo, vengeful, untrustworthy, and vacillating, but also capable of leading a band of 34 men, women, and children that, before it surrendered in 1886, managed to elude five thousand American troops and another three thousand Mexican soldiers. Geronimo rightly feared the fate in store for his people: They were deported on sealed railroad cars to Florida, where they remained POWs for 27 years, never to see their homelands again. A history that never loses its sense of drama even as it separates myth from truth. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: July 7, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-70221-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1993
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
