A vivid re-creation of an often overlooked episode in the Indian Wars. The Modoc War, fought in 186972, has largely been regarded as a sideshow in light of other, more famous campaigns, such as those against Crazy Horse and Cochise. Berkeley scholar Quinn, the author of several volumes of history (A New World, 1994, etc.), makes a solid case for why the war—really a series of skirmishes, some of them terribly bloody, on the Oregon-California border—should have a more central place in our historical canon. Noting that not all Modocs supported war leader Captain Jack and that not all white residents of the region supported the federal action against his band of warriors, Quinn proposes that the campaign be viewed not as another instance of ethnic-based genocide but as ``fundamentally a war between nations, the one very large, the other very small.'' In this war, the small nation held off the large one rather well, employing guerrilla tactics and fighting in a difficult landscape of lava beds and rough mountains, which led a federal officer to remark, ``I do not believe that a hundred thousand men in a hundred thousand years could construct such fortifications'' as the natural features in which the Modocs took refuge. As a result, the Americans sustained heavy losses and committed horrible atrocities in reprisal; the army also executed Captain Jack and his followers soon after their eventual surrender. Quinn's narrative is fluent, and at times even a little glib. Professional historians will not much like his generous use of invented dialogue, which will prevent the book from being taken as a serious study of these tragic events, but it is clear that the author has done his homework. As an introduction to the Modoc people and its unfortunate encounter with the American nation, Quinn's book serves well. (Author tour)
Pub Date: March 25, 1997
ISBN: 0-571-19903-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1997
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
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