Chandler sets out to prove that the mysterious death in 1809 of explorer Meriwether Lewis was a murder and that the plot was masterminded by an ally of former president Thomas Jefferson and sanctioned by Jefferson himself. The death of Lewis—explorer with William Clark, protÇgÇ of Jefferson, and governor of the newly acquired Louisiana Territory- -caused surprisingly little scandal or inquiry, despite its strange circumstances. Having been summoned to Washington to explain his trading expenses, Lewis died of gunshot wounds in an isolated frontier inn along his curiously inconvenient overland route. A hurried verdict of suicide came primarily from John Neelly, the local Indian Bureau liaison, and Jefferson later supported this, even insinuating drug or alcohol addiction. Local rumor said Lewis was murdered, either by Indians or frontier bandits, and later historians have suspected Neelly and Lewis's servant. Chandler's conspiracy theory fingers the disreputable Revolutionary War general James Wilkinson, later in his career a paid Spanish agent and a conspirator in Aaron Burr's planned invasion of Mexico. Wilkinson counted Jefferson as a longtime ally, particularly after double-crossing Burr and testifying at the infamous treason trial, but in 1809 a New Orleans army base scandal threatened to ruin him and possibly embarrass Jefferson. Chandler suggests that since Lewis could have damaged Wilkinson in Washington, Wilkinson sent his agent Neelly to intercept and murder Lewis. Pulitzer Prize- winner Chandler (The Binghams of Louisville, 1988) lays out the multifarious agendas of France, Spain, and the United States—and the schemes of their agents and adventurers—in his effort to uncover links between Wilkinson and the prime suspects in Lewis's death. Despite Chandler's bias against Jefferson, his role in a possible cover-up, much less a conspiracy, remains questionable. Chandler fits persuasive, albeit circumstantial, evidence into the puzzle of Lewis's death, situating it in the country's turbulent early era, but ultimately does not fill all the gaps and unknowns. (20 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 21, 1994
ISBN: 0-688-12225-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1994
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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