A comprehensive, meticulously researched history of the 1877 war between the Nez Perce and the US government. For decades, the Nez Perce had befriended whites (including Lewis and Clark) who crossed their territory in what's now the Northwest; in turn, explorers and settlers had praised the Nez Perce's peaceful, patriarchal society. But when the federal government, breaking a number of treaties, demanded that the Nez Perce surrender their homeland and move onto reservations, the alliance shattered. Violence erupted with the massacre of 18 white settlers by a band of Nez Perce warriors, an atrocity described in vivid detail by Hampton (who teaches at the National Outdoor Leadership School in Wyoming). The US Army—an undisciplined, uneducated, poorly supplied force in those post-Civil War years- -swung into action, and the Nez Perce retreated into Montana, Wyoming, and Canada on a 1200-mile march punctuated by cruelty and kindness on both sides. Hampton offers an hour-by-hour account of the major battles, as well as crisp portraits of the principal figures in the conflict. At first, the Indians placed their hopes in the silver-tongued Chief Joseph, forever identified in the popular imagination with the Nez Perce cause, but the author makes it clear that the disaffected warriors soon turned to other chiefs like Poker Joe and Looking Glass. Meanwhile, against the Indians stood a number of notable cavalry officers, including Nelson Miles and Oliver Howard. The outcome was predictably sordid, as the few hundred remaining Nez Perce surrendered and suffered a long internment at Leavenworth Prison before returning, with their society in shambles, back to the Northwest. Exciting and fair-minded: the definitive account of a dark hour in American history. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 12, 1994
ISBN: 0-8050-1991-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1993
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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