by Gustav Niebuhr ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2014
A pleasant surprise for the average history buff.
Enlightening tale of Abraham Lincoln’s other war.
In 1862, overshadowed by the Civil War, a dire conflict known as the Dakota War roiled the southern half of Minnesota. Journalist Niebuhr (Newspaper and Online Journalism/Syracuse Univ.; Beyond Tolerance: Searching for Interfaith Understanding in America, 2008) provides an intriguing examination of this chapter in American frontier history, focusing especially on the figure of Henry Benjamin Whipple (1822-1901). A transplant from New York and Illinois, Whipple was the first Episcopal bishop in Minnesota and immediately began crusading on behalf of Native Americans there. “He stated his goal simply: the Indians must be protected from corrupt government agents and rapacious traders, especially those who dealt in liquor and abused women,” writes the author. Throughout even the direst moments of the Dakota War and its aftermath, Whipple maintained that maltreatment at the hands of the American government had driven the Dakotas to acts of violence—and in many instances, quite grotesque violence. Niebuhr lays out the precipitant causes of the war—delayed annuities for tribes that had traded in land, leading to hunger and resentment—and chronicles its opening volleys. He also provides a detailed account of the war’s major engagements and its effects on white settlement. But the author always comes back to Whipple, seen by many as an Indian sympathizer, who nonetheless had profound influence on policymakers. His triumph was in convincing Lincoln to spare the lives of 275 Dakota captives (others were hanged for wanton brutality during the war). Niebuhr’s work sometimes feels choppy, bouncing back and forth chronologically and going over some of the same ground more than once. However, that does not lessen the fact that it provides a service by reintroducing readers to Whipple, an early proponent of minority rights, as well as to the Dakota War.
A pleasant surprise for the average history buff.Pub Date: June 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-209768-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
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BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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