A comprehensive, partisan, occasionally starry-eyed history of the famed (or perhaps infamous) Texas Rangers. Robinson (A Good Year to Die, 1995, etc.) tracks the Rangers back to their roots in 1823, when they were the equivalent of Western minutemen: mobile, irregular units who banded together in response to specific needs—mostly conflicts with Native Americans and the Spanish—and quickly disbanded thereafter. They were local men, tough as nails from working a mean landscape, and much appreciated for the protection they offered the settlers. Yet, as Robinson tries for the rousing angle in telling their tales, he too often paints the opposition as wholly barbarian—as gang rapists and as cannibals—in exculpation of ignoble Ranger behavior, even going so far as to conflate the Rangers— subduing of the Karankawas with their extinction. The Ranger who emerges from Robinson’s record served with distinction in the Mexican War, then chose the Confederacy in the Civil War. He quelled horrendous local conflicts, like the Jaybird-Woodpecker Feud, though his loyalties were sometimes for sale. He manhandled cattle rustlers, horse thieves, and highwaymen John Wesley Harding and Sam Bass, and killed numerous innocents in the border skirmishes of 1915—18. He was the Lone Ranger; he was a blackmailer and a revenge killer. By the 1920s and 1930s he was a fish out of water, and Robinson ends his history there, neatly skipping over unsavory Ranger conduct in the labor struggles of the 1970s. Robinson allows for all these identities, though no reader will mistake the relish with which he recounts an episode—in which an Indian has been surprised in his sleep—when one Ranger whispers to another: “Plug him.” In essence, an in-house history, gilding the good, displaying roguish behavior proudly on the sleeve. For many readers, an unconvincing attempt to restore the gleam to a Ranger star dulled by too many instances of bullying and mayhem. (B&w photos throughout)
Pub Date: March 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-679-45649-X
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1999
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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