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KILLING THE WHITE MAN'S INDIAN

REINVENTING NATIVE AMERICANS AT THE END OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

An incisive look at troubles simmering in the Indian nations that lie uncomfortably within our own. Journalist Bordewich (Cathay, 1991) has long had an interest in Native American issues; his mother was executive director of the Association on American Indian Affairs, and as he grew up, he frequently traveled to tribal centers. This book combines broad learning with solid journalism to form a reasoned indictment of both the federal treatment of Indians and society's relegation of them to a sometimes romantic but nonetheless dark corner of national life, where they keep on serving as ``reminders of a history that we would prefer not to remember and confusing our fantasies with real-life demands.'' Bordewich travels to Indian reservations across the country to examine endemic problems like gambling, alcoholism, suicide, poverty, and the federal government's inability to determine how Indian nations fit within the US framework. It is clear all along where his sympathies lie, but Bordewich is no celebrant of all things Indian. He demolishes a few pieties, among them the notion that genocide was ever federal policy, a common charge of groups like AIM. (Indeed, he writes, ``the new republic initially worried less about ridding itself of Indians than about how to protect them from the depredations of its own citizens.'') Neither does he find the present generation of Indians faultless, and he writes that among the many good qualities and aspirations, he ``also found ethnic chauvinism, a crippling instinct to confuse isolation with independence, and a chronic habit of interpreting present-day reality through the warping lens of the past.'' Yet Bordewich sees much hope for a revitalized Native America that will someday determine its own destiny. Bordewich has done his homework, and his writing is full of insights and telling anecdotes. The result is a more evenhanded if less powerful book than Peter Matthiessen's Indian Country, alongside which this worthy volume should be shelved.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-385-42035-8

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1995

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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