A densely populated account, rich in overlooked elements of the western experiment, executed with fine historical veracity.
A detailed narrative of the rise and decline of the Santa Fe Trail as an epochal vein of 19th-century expansion, courtesy of a noted Western enthusiast.
Dary (Cowboy Culture, not reviewed), an authority on the Old West, demonstrates a firm grasp of the terrain’s history—both before and after its acquisition by the US. During the mid-19th century the Santa Fe Trail’s importance grew rapidly (as a venue for trade with Mexico and as a stable and safe route across the politically volatile landscapes of New Mexico and Texas), even as the encroachments of civilization soon changed its character almost beyond recognition. The author devotes separate chapters to the early development of Santa Fe as a strategic center of trade, to the growth of trade in general throughout the region, to the crucial role of the “Prairie schooner” (the Pittsburgh-manufactured Conestoga wagon) in the transport of goods, and to the role of the Trail in the Mexican-American and Civil wars. Dary is skilled at resurrecting the old lives of this landscape and introduces us to local characters, such as Francis Aubry (a brash trader who crossed the Trail in six days to win a $1,000 bet), Matteo Boccalini (who fled the priesthood to live an even more ascetic lifestyle in a solitary outpost along the Trail), William Bent (who established his own fort along the Arkansas River and profited from the Indian trade), and Susan Magoffin (a trader’s wife who kept a tart journal of the Trail’s privations). Most startling are the accounts of the frequent Indian raids: aggressive tribes like the Apache and Comanche attacked merchant and settler parties without mercy, often abducting those (usually women and children) whom they failed to massacre. Dary seems obsessed with “telling it like it was,” even extending to his mournful chapter “The Slow Death of the Trail” (which blames rapid railway expansion in the 1870s).
A densely populated account, rich in overlooked elements of the western experiment, executed with fine historical veracity.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-40361-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 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 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
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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