Only marginally useful for general readers, and likely to be dismissed by specialists and knowledgeable buffs.
Detailed, intermittently interesting, but finally unrewarding study of America’s 19th-century overland expansion from (perhaps too) prolific biographer/historian McLynn (Napoleon, 2002, etc.).
“The 19th century saw the American character at its best, and the best of that best was probably evinced on the wagon trains West.” This cheering sentiment, like much else in McLynn’s sweeping study, is factually questionable and ultimately empty. The author is keen to demonstrate what the drive west says about the American character, marked in his view by “permanent rootlessness . . . spatial mobility, relocation, and the belief in the Fresh Start.” In doing so, however, he overlooks a basic reality of 19th-century life: most of the men who went west (often accompanied by unwilling women and children) did so not out of some grand sense of Manifest Destiny or adventure, but because they wanted land, a commodity in short supply in the crowded East. Generations of American historians have established this fundamentally economic motivation for the acquisition of lebensraum, but McLynn persists in holding a romanticized and eminently European view of the era, as well as an eminently European lack of knowledge about the Native American cultures that Anglo pioneers encountered and battled. That said, he does a reasonable job of charting the rise and fall of such important overland routes as the Oregon and Santa Fe trails and of depicting some of the well-known pioneers and explorers who crossed them, such as Charles Frémont, Jedediah Smith, and the unfortunate members of the Donner Party. McLynn’s anecdotes and odd bits of fact, which make up the best parts here, are well chosen, particularly those having to do with how newcomers to the West gouged, swindled, and otherwise mistreated those who arrived a day later, a constant of American history much worthier of examination than our supposed wanderlust.
Only marginally useful for general readers, and likely to be dismissed by specialists and knowledgeable buffs.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-8021-1731-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
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
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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