Lavender, a prolific historian of the West (The Way to the Western Sea, 1988, etc.), offers a tragic tale of a Native American tribe's loss of its land, culture, and identity. The 1877 flight of the Nez PercÇ is one of the most famous and mournful episodes in the long history of Indian disenfranchisement. For three and a half months and 1700 miles, they managed to elude General O.O. Howard in an escape from their Pacific Northwest homelands, only to be overtaken a mere two days' ride from safety in Canada. During that time, white Americans came to admire the tribe's Chief Joseph as a master orator and military tactician who continually managed to outfox his pursuers. Here, Lavender sees the flight of the Nez PercÇ as the culmination of the tribe's more than 75 years of encounters with whites, including Lewis and Clark, British and American fur traders, missionaries, miners, farmers, Indian agents, and federal troops. In the process, the Nez PercÇ were buffeted by outside forces—horses, guns, diseases, material goods they badly wanted but could scarcely afford—that filled them with doubt about their traditional guardian spirits (wayakins). Yet, Lavender says, the major mistake this peaceful, much put-upon people made was to believe the US government's promise that treaties guaranteed their right to the land of their fathers. As sympathetic as Lavender is to the Nez PercÇ, though, he is careful not to make exaggerated claims for them. For instance, he shows that General Howard invented Chief Joseph's skill as a wily military genius in order to excuse the general's own bumbling pursuit of the tribe. A powerful lament for a tribe that illustrates, as Lavender says, ``the infinite sadness of a race's defeat and death.'' (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs.)
Pub Date: May 20, 1992
ISBN: 0-06-016707-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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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