One of two action-packed works about the notorious border ruffian and Confederate guerrilla to be published this season (see Duane Schultz's Quantrill's War: The Life and Times of William Clarke Quantrill, p. 1134). Little has survived in Quantrill's hand, writes freelance historian Leslie (Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls, 1988): a few letters home, a couple of commemorative verses, an eight-paragraph military report. It is thus not easy to determine what motivated the man who terrorized the abolitionists of Kansas before and during the Civil War. Born in Ohio to a Unionist family who opposed slavery, he seems to have been converted to the Southern cause while working as a freighter in Utah Territory during the Mormon War, and he embraced the cause with ferocious energy. A part-time cattle rustler when the Civil War broke out, Quantrill, writes Leslie, seems to have had a streak of cruelty—a wartime associate recalls that he once shot a pig just to make it squeal—that served him well in his campaign of terror. Many thousands of deaths can be attributed to his guerrilla command, including the 150 civilians slain during his infamous 1863 raid on Lawrence, Kan. ``I would cover the armies of the Confederacy all over with blood,'' he wrote to a superior. ``I would invade. I would reward audacity. I would exterminate. . . . I would win the independence of my people or I would find them graves.'' Quantrill rode into infamy, dying at the age of 27 near the war's end; his notoriety was assured both because of his own depredations and because among his soldiers were Frank and Jesse James and the Cole brothers, who were to become famous outlaws. Leslie does a remarkably thorough job of telling Quantrill's bloody story, and especially of relating the grisly fate of his remains, which the author traces as they traveled over the next century from one burial site to another, with an intermediate stop at an Ohio fraternity house. Highly recommended for Civil War buffs and students of frontier history. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42455-5
Page Count: 447
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996
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 Yorkerstaff 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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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