Raises important questions about the ability of history to chronicle a truth that transcends its authors’ biases.
A treatise that seeks to rediscover a people erased from modern memory by the clumsy naming tactics of early European explorers.
Brack aims to identify the indigenous inhabitants of the central Maine coast during the region’s initial recorded contact with Europeans in the early 1600s. He tackles a debate within the historical community about whether to use the English explorers’ system of naming the ethnic groups or the more restrictive French approach. In doing so, the author makes a powerful argument for synthesizing all available sources that reveal a more prominent role for a confederacy of communities broadly known as Abanaki, and more specifically the Wawenoc group. While Brack acknowledges many lingering questions in the historical record, he also contends that the Wawenocs were a significant force in early Maine before being eliminated by inter-tribal fur-trade wars and pandemic disease. He provides fascinating descriptions of the Europeans’ tendency to conflate peoples under generic names, which caused the Wawenoc appellation, and thus the record of the group’s existence and identity, to disappear from history. However, Brack fails to explain what was unique about the group and what should be remembered about them. He bemoans the lack of native voices in the historical narrative, further leaving the reader wondering why he simply provides addresses of indigenous websites rather than exploring content more in-depth. Brack’s reinterpretation of primary-source documents is nonetheless masterful, broadening the historical lens to account for the ethnocentric interests of native translators, the French settlers’ motives for giving primacy to indigenous groups allied with them and the effect of 17th-century authors, who had not settled or traveled widely in Wawenoc territory. A combination of those and other cited factors could plausibly have drowned the memory of a people.
Raises important questions about the ability of history to chronicle a truth that transcends its authors’ biases.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-9769153-2-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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