Dispiriting but essential scholarly reading for students of early modern California.
It was no accident that California’s Indians were slaughtered by the droves in the mid-19th century, writes UCLA historian Madley, but instead the product of design.
We know the heyday of genocide, from just before the Gold Rush until the early 1870s, almost only from the Anglo point of view. There’s good reason for that: as the author documents, very nearly killing by individual killing, the Native population of California fell from about 150,000 to about 30,000. The word “genocide” is used advisedly, even given such stark numbers, for, as Madley also observes, in many instances the indigenous people fought back, if never with the terrible effect of the Anglo invaders, who imported legal and political institutions that allowed them to justify the slaughter. (Pointedly, the author observes that the killings tapered off at just about the time Indians were allowed for the first time to serve as witnesses in murder trials.) Some of the killings that Madley documents were one-on-one murder; others, such as the spectacularly error-prone campaign against the Modoc that closed the period, involved huge numbers of men: “US Army soldiers, California volunteers, Oregon militiamen, and Indian scouts,” to say nothing of howitzers and other heavy weapons, arrayed against a badly outmatched band of Indians in the lava beds of northern California. Somehow, the American casualties were 10 times greater than their quarry’s. From massacre to judicial killing to hanging, Madley moves with a scholar’s care across a terrible landscape, and while his findings will surprise no student of Native American history or westward expansion, they amount to a depressing but wholly necessary litany. Much of the book—almost 200 pages—is given over to a series of appendices that detail incidents along with the number of people killed, the location, and the historical attestations for each.
Dispiriting but essential scholarly reading for students of early modern California.Pub Date: May 24, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-300-18136-4
Page Count: 680
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
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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