Despite its flaws, the book tells a story of considerable importance to Medicine Liners, their far-flung descendants, and...
A comprehensive look at the volatile history of the border territory separating Montana and Canada.
NPR commentator LaDow’s debut explores in both chronological and human terms the shifting fortunes of this arid prairie region, beginning with the age of Manifest Destiny and the waning of the Indian Wars. She sees Sitting Bull’s 1881 surrender, following his victory over Custer and several years of refuge in Canada, as a metaphor for the transformations enacted by this harsh, vast land on the many ethnic and religious groups who settled there. LaDow explores in great detail the slow development over the 19th century of increasingly rowdy, centralized communities like Medicine Hat, Saskatchewan, and Chinook, Montana, paying attention to the human costs of competitiveness and bigotry and offering good depictions of many significant figures, such as incompetent Mounted Policeman Frank Dickens (son of Charles) and Louis Riel, leader of a rebellion by Canada’s Métis people. Throughout, the author is sensitive to the traumas endured by various native tribes, who saw their old ways of existence die along the Medicine Line. Her narrative has many powerful moments, as when we glimpse the ghost communities that dotted the landscape in the early 20th century after speculator James Hill’s artificially created “land rush” foundered due to repeated droughts and other natural catastrophes that caused the practitioners of “dry farming” to flee their homesteads in droves. Wallace Stegner, who was interviewed for this project, termed the Medicine Line region of his childhood “the capital of an unremembered past.” LaDow ably captures that past, limning the scope of the many changes and cultural conflicts that penetrated this stark region, even though her prose is often turgid and her points repetitive.
Despite its flaws, the book tells a story of considerable importance to Medicine Liners, their far-flung descendants, and students of the bitter culture clashes endemic during the era of western expansion.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-415-92764-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Routledge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
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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