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SEVEN TRAILS WEST

A fine narrative history of the various pathways that allowed Manifest Destiny (in all its dubious incarnations) to become a reality. From 1805 to 1869, from the Lewis and Clark expedition to the driving of the golden spike at Promontory Summit, a half-million people went west, and the country expanded by some 2,000 miles from the Mississippi to the Pacific. The Lewis and Clark expedition might not have found the Northwest Passage, but it did reinforce American geopolitical claims to the continental landmass, and it gave a hint of the commercial possibilities ripe for exploitation, first among them the fur trade. Explorers, fortune-seekers, but mostly just plain folk seeking a better life followed the trappers, beating their way along such routes as the Santa Fe Trail, 1,000 hot, dry miles through hostile territory (the Pawnee, Kiowa, and Comanche were none too thrilled by the pilgrims' progress); the often brutal Oregon-California Trail; and the Mormon Trail blazed by the Latter-day Saints. Then there were what Peters describes as ``trails of a new order that enabled speed of communication and transport'': first the Pony Express, then the transcontinental telegraph, a thin thread of wire stretching from New York City to San Francisco. The apex (or nadir, depending on your point of view) was reached with the transcontinental railroad irrevocably linking the country: ``From sea to sea, America was now one nation.'' The railroad was forced down the throats of Native Americans with Sherman's ugly Indian policy: ``The more we can kill this year, the less will have to be killed in the next war.'' Peters's vivid, anecdotal narrative of these routes illustrates how the frontier was shaped by contingency working within the context of explosive cultural processes. To this already admirable drama add superb graphic work- -archival photos, maps, contemporary photography, period paintings- -and you have an elegant, captivating package. (208 illustrations, 56 in color, 8 original maps)

Pub Date: May 20, 1996

ISBN: 1-55859-782-4

Page Count: 252

Publisher: Abbeville Press

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1996

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

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 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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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