Readers will surely remember Jack Slade henceforth. A treat for Western history buffs and fans of true crime.
An ambitious, well-written effort to restore a Wild West desperado to history.
Broad Street Review editor Rottenberg (In the Kingdom of Coal, 2003, etc.) has a yen for back roads geographical and historical. This long tale, full of shaggy-dog elements, begins on a back road on the High Plains that was once America’s chief highway for wagon trains crossing to California and the Pacific Northwest by way of South Pass, Wyo. There he picks up the trail of Joseph Alfred “Jack” Slade, a figure long forgotten, turning up these days in the occasional monograph or journal article. Slade, by Rottenberg’s vigorous account, has all the makings of a Western character that ought to be remembered, begging for portrayal by, say, Tommy Lee Jones or Russell Crowe. Zelig-like, he turns up as a muleteer, wagon-train driver and stagecoach exec along the Emigrant Trail, serving as de facto law of the land over a large area of what is now Nebraska, Colorado and Wyoming. His stern enforcement of the law in a time of outlaws and dry-gulchers, to say nothing of secessionists, kept a steady flow of ore streaming from the western goldfields to the federal treasury. Yet this lawman went bad, turning to drink and crime, becoming a bully and general pest across his former domain. Ironically, given that he was one of those who “could believe that a few salutary hangings might enhance their security,” he met his end at the hands of a vigilante mob, as Mark Twain recorded in Roughing It—inaccurately, Rottenberg shows. Likening Slade to the twin leads of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Rottenberg considers why Slade’s trail went south, and why he is not better remembered—perhaps because “he resisted neat categorization…He could not even be labeled a good man or a bad one.”
Readers will surely remember Jack Slade henceforth. A treat for Western history buffs and fans of true crime.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59416-070-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Westholme Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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