As this abundantly detailed history shows, no one evades blame for the bloody past.
Rejecting an idealized version of American tribal life, a historian tells a complex story.
Smith (1917-1995), winner of the Bancroft Prize for a biography of John Adams, is best known for his eight-volume A People’s History of the United States (1976-1987). In the years before he died, the author recognized that the relationship between Euro-Americans and tribal peoples had become, as he put it, “a major preoccupation of white Americans,” fueled in part by the counterculture’s romanticized view of peaceful Indians attacked by “genocidal criminals.” Seeing the need for a corrective, Smith aimed to render history “as simply and directly as possible” by collecting chapters from each volume of his People’s History to form a narrative overview, adding an additional chapter updating the story to the 1990s. The result is a vivid recounting of brutality, duplicity, and violence on all sides. Since tribes often fought one another, warfare erupted not only between whites and Indians, but also among rival tribes. Sioux and Menominie, for example, were traditional enemies of the Sauk and Foxes; by 1775, the Miami had waged war for 100 years with the Iroquois, who counted among their many enemies the Potowatomi. During the American Revolution, the British drafted Indians as mercenaries, unleashing them against settlers, especially along the frontier, where “a ruthless and barbarous total war” caused more casualties “than Washington’s Continental Army suffered in all its major engagements.” Once the new nation was formed, tribal strife impeded negotiations and treaties. As the government began its policy of Indian removal, fierce fighting broke out between small groups of whites and Indians, sometimes incited by American militias that were often “disorderly and undisciplined.” While Smith admires some elements of tribal life, such as a sense of the sacredness of the natural world, he cautions against idealizing Indian culture.
As this abundantly detailed history shows, no one evades blame for the bloody past.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61902-574-5
Page Count: 420
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
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
