A welcome addition to Cherokee history.
A vigorous account of the forced removal of the Cherokee people from their southern homelands and the complex events leading to what the author does not hesitate to call a “death march.”
Charleston Post and Courier senior writer Hicks (When the Dancing Stopped: The Real Story of the Morro Castle Disaster and Its Deadly Wake, 2006, etc.) shapes his story around tribal leader John Ross, popularly known as “the Cherokee Moses,” who led his people to Oklahoma and thereafter tried to forge of their reservation a true independent state. “He was the architect of the tribe’s greatest period of advancement; he made the Cherokees the most civilized of American Indian tribes,” writes the author. It is no small curiosity that Ross was as white as were the settlers who infringed on Cherokee territory and eventually displaced his people, whose number he joined by choice out on the frontier. In fact, he “barely had any Indian blood coursing through his veins. Yet, as Hicks, himself of Cherokee ancestry, capably argues, Ross was perhaps the greatest of all Cherokee leaders, even though in many ways he failed at his efforts. For one thing, he often outflanked but could never completely outrun Andrew Jackson, who was bent on making the hunting grounds of the Cumberland Plateau a white domain. Even before he became president, Jackson wanted to force the Indians of the southeast onto distant reservations to the west. For another, Ross’s efforts were often undone by tribal factionalism, betrayed even by his own brother. In his attempts to forge a true confederacy of Cherokee bands, he failed to reckon with private jealousies and with the demands of Indians who had already moved west before Ross and his people arrived. Hicks writes with appropriate indignation of their removal, calling it “little more than a human cattle drive.” He also takes a measured view of Ross’s opponents and allies alike, shedding new light on the career of other eminent figures such as the newspaperman and Confederate general Stand Watie.
A welcome addition to Cherokee history.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1963-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2010
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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