A pathbreaking scholarly work, by one of the nation’s leading historians of the interaction between Native Americans and European newcomers in early America. In this deeply researched book, Bancroft Prize—winning historian Merrell (The Indians’ New World, not reviewed) unearths the lives of the go-betweens—translators, diplomats, traders, and others—who for a time linked the disparate peoples of colonial America into a network of functioning relationships. This volume is also an extended essay on the meaning and significance of woodlands and wilderness to New World natives and colonists. With Pennsylvania as its focus, the book traces the lives and activities of people of whom many historians will never have heard—of transcultural Indians (such as Shekallamy) and colonists (such as Conrad Weiser) who had “unmatched ability to negotiate the frontier’s cultural terrain.” That terrain was a forested borderland of language, trade, religion, settlement, and treaty-making. And its go-betweening inhabitants, whom Merrell brilliantly brings to life, faced not just formidable obstacles of culture but the more tangible ones of food, travel, lodging, and safety as they tried to create comity between people of vastly different ways and thought. But cultural borders were never to be fully crossed, nor peace easily secured. Whatever these dedicated go-betweens might attempt, armed skirmishes, then war, eventually came to the colony by the 1760s, and no go-betweens could save the natives from the resulting disaster. Never before has this generally well-known story been told this way—as a history of identity, acculturation, nature, and words. Anthropologists, ethnographers, even naturalists and linguists, as well as historians, will welcome and mine the book for years. Written in language as robust as a monograph will allow, the book is a stunning achievement. (30 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-393-04676-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1998
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
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
