by David Dary ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 10, 2004
A thoroughgoing chronicle, told with generous enthusiasm, skill, and an eye for plain truths as well as detail. (86...
Dary follows the Oregon Trail, pre-history to post-history, with many nooks and crannies in between.
From the early 1840s until the coming of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, the Oregon Trail was one of the great routes west, running for 2,000 miles (at an oxen-powered 3-miles-per-hour) from Missouri to the country that was to become Washington, Oregon, and California. Award-winning western historian Dary (The Santa Fe Trail, 2000, etc.), a brisk, silvery writer, makes careful use of diaries, journals, recollections, reports, and newspaper accounts to conduct readers from the first European peopling of the Oregon area (for this he’s prepared to go back to Marco Polo) to beaver hunters and missionaries, from the Hudson’s Bay Company to the expeditions searching for an overland route. The author explains the economic pressures that encouraged citizens to undertake so arduous a journey, recounting many of the westward movement’s historic events: the Donner Party, the Gold Rush(es), the Mormon exodus, treaties and promises brokered with native populations, treaties and promises broken. But it is Dary’s depiction of the great and awful everyday that will grab the reader: cholera and the buffalo gnat (“a diminutive insect,” wrote one emigrant, “that, before you are conscious of its presence, has bitten your face ears, and neck in ten thousand places”), a French naval deserter running a trading post to hell and gone in the Nebraska panhandle, the unadorned wonder of life on the trail. “I could not but reflect upon the singular concurrence of the events of the day,” mused another traveler. “A death and a funeral, a wedding and a birth had occurred in this wilderness, within a diameter of two miles, and within two hours’ time.”
A thoroughgoing chronicle, told with generous enthusiasm, skill, and an eye for plain truths as well as detail. (86 illustrations, 7 maps)Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-41399-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
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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
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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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