A solid history of the formative years of the land of Microsoft and Boeing. (2 maps)
A lively, readable history of the exploration and settlement of the Pacific Northwest.
It’s hard to imagine a more timely tale for American readers than a history of the peopling by European-Americans of the increasingly vital states at the end of the old Oregon Trail. Walker, an experienced writer of Old West history (Bear Flag Rising, 1999, etc.), is just the one to tell it. Not that this is up-to-date Western history: Walker makes no use of the recent works that have revolutionized our understanding of both the real and mythic American West. There are few women here (although Narcissa Whitman plays her worthy part); native tribes are factors in, but not agents of, historical change; neither irony nor hardship are front and center. Nevertheless, this is the best kind of conventional history-telling, in the tradition of the great 19th-century historian Francis Parkman. Walker relates the adventures of men—sailors, explorers, trailblazers, missionaries, settlers—with verve and energy. In addition to the normal cast of western characters—John Jacob Astor, Marcus Whitman, and John C. Frémont—he gives lesser known, often colorful, figures (like Robert Stuart, George Simpson, and Hall J. Kelley) their due. And, working backward—a distinctive approach—from West to East and concentrating as much on these people’s destination as on their journey there, he looks upon them as would the Indians along the trail who watched these strange people go by and wondered where they were headed and why. While what drew people to their destination differed from person to person, by the 1840s (when the Oregon Territory fell permanently to the US) all were part of a great adventure that mixed ambition, hope, war, and diplomacy.
A solid history of the formative years of the land of Microsoft and Boeing. (2 maps)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-86933-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
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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