A plodding, long, but serviceable biography of the great Apache leader. Sweeney (Cochise, 1991) synthesizes the existing literature on Mangas Coloradas, alias —Red Sleeves,— a strikingly gifted Apache war leader and diplomat who was ambushed and murdered by American soldiers in 1863. He also turns up some hitherto unknown details about Mangas Coloradas’s life and, more valuably, debunks earlier portrayals—especially the unreliable writings of the contemporary journalist John C. Cremony. It was Cremony who spiced up an already dramatic story by writing that Mangas Coloradas turned against the US government (toward which he had originally been well-disposed) as the result of an unceremonious beating he received at the hands of white gold miners. Sweeney believes that this incident never took place; instead, Mangas Coloradas simply ran out of options in attempting to negotiate the boundaries of a territory his people, the Chiricahua Apaches, could call their own. —Intolerable American encroachment,— according to Sweeney, —came in the form of miners, farmers, and ranchers. They swallowed up much of his country, occupied prime farming areas, devoured the earth by mining, and drove out much of his game.— And when those Americans did so, Mangas Coloradas took up arms, leading his people in a ferocious two-year war against the US Army. That war cost the Apaches dearly, and it was settled only briefly; as Sweeney notes, Mangas Coloradas’s son-in-law (the better-known war leader Cochise) continued the struggle—as did a distant relative named Geronimo. The irony in all this, Sweeney properly remarks, is that the Americans could easily have made a lasting peace with Mangas Coloradas, whose demands for self-determination were altogether modest. Sweeney’s narrative is weighted down with too much incidental detail, but it accords the great Apache leader his due. (46 illustrations, 3 maps, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8061-3063-6
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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