A well-researched but overly complex dissection of a forgotten yet pivotal episode in American history.
An economist’s debut historical novel focuses on the roots and impact of the Virginia Uprising of 1675-76.
At the beginning of this ambitious work, violent attacks by the Susquehannock spread fear throughout Virginia. A brutal military retaliation leads the tribe to plan a getaway west to “Kain-tuck-ee” while its warriors continue raiding farms. Burgess Thomas Swann advocates brokering peace, but unscrupulous Sir William Berkeley, governor of the Royal Colony of Virginia, concentrates on profitability: “If some get killed, that’s in our interest. It makes land available for men of quality.” When peace efforts fail and the conflict intensifies, settlers petition Sir William to authorize strikes against the Native Americans by troops under Commissioned Officer Nat Bacon. But this leads to an elaborate sequence of cat-and-mouse machinations between the troops and Sir William, who bristles at anyone trying to influence how he runs Virginia. When Bacon successfully ends the assaults, Sir William regains the upper hand by declaring all of the soldiers traitors, hunting them down for execution and seizure of their property. He is ousted and replaced when King Charles II intervenes from England in response to the petition of people like Swann who seek a fair level of representation returned to the populous without threat of retribution. Crabbe convincingly argues in her book that this “popular insurgency” in Virginia yielded significant socioeconomic changes with far-reaching effects on America’s future. Her judicious research is evident by the long bibliography of both primary and secondary sources. In addition, the author boasts an extensive vocabulary of arcane words appropriate to the era. In terms of cultural sensitivity, engrossing details are offered in the Native American passages, but they too often fall into the noble savage trope. The novel’s constantly changing locations, mix of Native American and Gregorian calendars, and more than 70 characters could deter casual readers from wading through the daunting labyrinth for what is at heart an intriguing retelling of an underrepresented event.
A well-researched but overly complex dissection of a forgotten yet pivotal episode in American history.Pub Date: May 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9988114-0-6
Page Count: 292
Publisher: The Global Finance Group
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
