A remarkable history of the Crow nation that demonstrates the resiliency of a people in the face of extraordinary odds. Hoxie, an editor of the Cambridge Studies in North American Indian History series, of which this book is a part, seizes upon an apt metaphor for the Crow Indians' trail through 19th and early 20th century American history: the parade. In the first known encounter between Anglo and Crow, recorded by Canadian trader Franáois Antoine Larocque in 1805, Crow warriors paraded through a village bedecked in splendid costumes; from that moment, through an ad hoc parade toward Crow Agency, Mont., in 1990, the Crow people have been marching along with the times. But unlike the Cherokee Indians' Trail of Tears and similar government-enforced marches, the Crows' parading has been largely of their own volition. Hoxie demonstrates this through the central event of his storythe relocation in 1884 of approximately 900 Crow Indians from Stillwater, Mont., to the Little Bighorn River and nearby Pryor Creek, a parade that would play a significant role in the survival of the Crow nation into this century. While the idea of relocating to the fertile area near the Little Bighorn was initiated by white Indian Agent Henry Armstrong, the details of the move were dictated by Crow leaders led by Chief Plenty Coups, a warrior who was commited to cooperation with whites. Realizing that their former hunting lifestyle was no longer viable, these leaders chose to become farmers and ranchers. The relocation represented not an end, therefore, but a new beginning that would allow the Crow nation to participate, along with America's diverse cultures, in this country's future. As Hoxie here convincingly argues, reports of the Crows' demise have been greatly exaggerated. (24 halftones, 6 maps) (History Book Club alternate selection)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-521-48057-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Cambridge Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
Categories: FIRST/NATIVE NATIONS | HISTORY
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BOOK REVIEW
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | UNITED STATES | HISTORY | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ETHNICITY & RACE
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