by Geoffrey O’Gara ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 18, 2000
O’Gara’s excellent study will be of interest to anyone concerned with Indian law, and with Native American issues generally.
A thoughtful view of momentous events in a forgotten corner of America.
Wyoming is a place where pronghorn antelope outnumber people, and where boom-and-bust economic cycles have resulted in a mostly transient population. Many of those who stay are Indians, and they do so because they have nowhere else to go, writes journalist O’Gara (Long Road Home, not reviewed). While a romantic notion has it that Native Americans “are connected to the land in some sacred sense forever inaccessible to non-Indians,” the fact is that “as an Indian you’re part of a community interminably grounded in a place,” no matter how depressed and depressing that place might be. Wyoming’s Wind River Reservation, the homeland of the Arapaho and Shoshone peoples, has seen hard times; like most other reservations, it’s poor and undeveloped, with little promise for its inhabitants. But unlike many reservations, it has inspired a genuine resistance movement, one that involves Native Americans’ taking full control of resources promised to them by treaty long ago and then, of course, taken away. In semiarid Wyoming, the most important of those resources is water, always a controversial and confusing subject in the history of the American West. O’Gara does not entirely steer clear of confusion himself; as he notes, covering Indian issues is difficult because tribal governments are usually closed to the press, and “because Indians have found invisibility a useful survival tool since the conquest,” making the facts sometimes hard to come by. And he certainly doesn’t shy away from controversy, as he carefully tracks the legal path from state benches to the US Supreme Court that the Wind River Reservation’s inhabitants have had to follow to secure rights to rivers that have been under the control of white farmers and ranchers for generations—and that those farmers and ranchers do not want to surrender.
O’Gara’s excellent study will be of interest to anyone concerned with Indian law, and with Native American issues generally.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2000
ISBN: 0-679-40415-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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