An all-too-short, manylayered tale that succeeds as a roots memoir, detective story, and revelation of tragically tangled...
An American ethnographer's journal of a 1930 sojourn with a band of renegade Apaches living in Mexico's Sierra Madre mountains, published now for the first time, along with his son's account of travels in his father's footsteps.
Grenville Goodwin, the author of two scholarly studies of Apache Indians, died in 1940 at the age of 33 while his wife was still pregnant with their son, Neil. The young Neil was to grow up obsessed with his father's adventures, but it was not until 1962 that Neil's mother would dust off a journal of Grenville's explorations that had been packed away in an attic. To an admiring son whose imagination was fired with visions of his unknown father’s travels among the Indians, it was a treasure trove—and an itinerary. Between 1978 and 1999, Neil (now a documentary filmmaker with a wife and son) made six trips to Arizona and Mexico, then spliced his own diary with his father's, creating a parallax view of his father and the people he studied. Called the Ndendaa'i (``the People who Make Trouble'') by the Apaches on American reservations, this loose band of mixedbreed Indians refused to surrender with Geronimo in 1886 and survived in later years by raiding settlers and kidnapping children (whom they subsequently raised as Apaches). Grenville, born into a wealthy Connecticut family, came west to cure his tuberculosis and began to study native Americans at the University of Arizona when he heard that a punitive expedition was being organized to wipe out the mountain renegades. Hoping to study the group before it was wiped out, Grenville found their encampments, lived briefly among them, and learned some of their language. Half-a-century later, Neil found some of these encampments, fleshed out his father's studies, and gained insights into his father's restless character.
An all-too-short, manylayered tale that succeeds as a roots memoir, detective story, and revelation of tragically tangled bloodlines.Pub Date: May 10, 2000
ISBN: 0-8032-2175-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2000
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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