by Daniel Richter ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 1, 2001
A hallmark in recent Native American historiography that merits wide attention.
An excellent, ambitious attempt to restore to history long-overlooked Indians who “neither uncompromisingly resisted . . . nor wholeheartedly assimilated” in the face of white encroachment.
Much work on American Indian history has concentrated on the Great Plains and Far West, but a growing movement among (mostly junior) historians focuses attention on the Eastern woodland peoples who lived more or less at peace with the European newcomers during the period of colonial rule, treated by the overseas authorities as members of sovereign nations. Only with the attainment of American independence, writes Richter (Director, McNeil Center for Early American Studies/Univ. of Pennsylvania), did these scattered peoples find themselves considered part of a monolithic whole (“despite ancient rivalries among nations and speakers of different languages, they were all Indians”), a whole that, thought by definition to be the enemy, had to be subdued. Most of them, descendants of larger groups that had been fragmented by disease and other forces before and immediately after the arrival of the whites, had tried to “incorporate European objects and ideas into Indian country on Indian terms.” Thus their cultures, altered by the introduction of alien modes of exchange and materials (like iron, which spurred what Richter memorably calls America’s “first arms race,” and pigs, which wreaked havoc on forest ecosystems and starved out the game Indians depended on), would have been unrecognizable to their ancestors in many ways, and nowhere more so than in New England, where Anglo participants in King Philip’s War who dressed and behaved like Indians battled Indians who dressed and behaved like whites. None of this mattered to the expansionist-minded American government, which abjured the “mutual benefits of trade, peace, and stability” of Crown policy and declared war on Native America militarily, socially, and culturally, making Indian-hating a tenet of national policy—and setting in motion tragic events that haunt us even now.
A hallmark in recent Native American historiography that merits wide attention.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-674-00638-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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