A century after being written, vivid memories of the Civil War and the American frontier see the light of day. In editing these memoirs, Viola (Ben Nighthorse Campbell, p. 1190) improved punctuation and sentence structure but otherwise attempted to ``retain the charm of Charles Henry Veil's literary style.'' Said charms are, it must be said, partly veiled, as Veil writes in an artless, direct manner devoid of flourish. But this has its benefits. His reporting seems reliable (although Viola reports that Veil confabulated about the most critical moment in his life—his recovery of the body of General John Reynolds on the battlefield at Gettysburg, an act that won Veil promotion from foot soldier to officer). Veil doesn't mince over bloodshed, describing with relish how he killed two cavalry deserters with a single bullet, and how he watched General Custer and men lynch some of Mosby's Raiders. His battlefield scenes pop with action. Out West, the pace accelerates. Veil fights an alligator, gallops through sandstorms, hunts with Custer. Above all, he kills Apache. His text discloses indiscriminate slaughter on both sides, along with frontier prejudices of the day: to Veil, Mexicans are ``greasy,'' Jews are obsessed with money, Indians are ``like animals.'' As the West settles down, Veil turns to financial schemes—mining, land deals, hog farming—and proves a successful entrepreneur. He concludes by proudly noting that where, on his arrival in 1866, he found ``unknown territory inhabited almost entirely by the most savage tribes,'' now rises the city of Phoenix with 15,000 teeming souls. A troubling mix of violence, ignorance, and courage: a valuable piece of Americana. (Sixteen b&w photographs, one map- -not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 10, 1993
ISBN: 0-517-59463-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
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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