A sympathetic portrait of a Native American leader perhaps best known to fans of Lonesome Dove. Quanah Parker (18501911) was among the last of his people's free-ranging warriors. Born when Texas was newly a state, Parker ascended to the rank of war chief through exceptional acts of bravery in almost constant combat (the name Comanche comes from the Ute language and means something approximating ``anyone who wants to fight me all the time''). He was more clement than many of his fellow warriors, shunning the traditional practice of torturing captured enemies, and this earned him the grudging respect of the Anglos who were then swarming over Texas seeking the wealth of the new land (and who, it should be noted, were just as tenaciously warlike as the indigenes). But Parker was more than just a fighter, as poet and historian Neeley is careful to point out. A skilled diplomat, he negotiated for the Comanches an initially tentative, eventually enduring peace with the invaders that spared his people the indignities bestowed on other nations that fought back against the white man. The author sometimes wanders from sympathy into the dangerous territory of hagiography, making angels out of fallible mortals, and he is capable of writing silly sentencese.g., ``The spiritual dimension of Native American life had for centuries sustained the red man.'' Some of the supporting cast could stand better development, too, for example, important figures such as legendary rancher Charles Goodnight and Texas Ranger Sul Ross, once Parker's enemies, later his friends. Still, this is a good biography of a man who deserves remembrance and a useful introduction to Comanche history and lifeways as well. Valuable for its information, if not its style.
Pub Date: July 21, 1995
ISBN: 0-471-11722-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1995
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 Yorkerstaff 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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