Best suited for an academic audience.
A historian’s account of the political struggles that surrounded the founding of Austin as the Texas state capital.
Originally known as Waterloo, Austin began in 1837 as a tiny, far-flung Anglo-American settlement on the banks of the Colorado River. Texas had just declared independence from Mexico the year before and had no permanent capital. When presidential candidate Mirabeau Lamar went campaigning in 1838, he was enchanted enough by the area’s lush beauty to claim that if elected, he would declare it the capital of the fledgling republic. But Lamar’s dream of making Austin the “seat of future empire” met with stiff opposition. Supporters of his archrival, Sam Houston, wanted the capital to remain in the east—specifically, in Houston’s namesake city. Lamar’s election victory gave him the clout he needed to move the capital to Austin, which he believed would eventually link western lands yet to be conquered to Texas seaports in the south. The reality was quite different—and dangerous. The city’s remoteness left it vulnerable to Indian attacks, and its geographical location made it susceptible to periods of drought. After Mexican troops captured San Antonio in 1842, President Sam Houston ordered the government back to east Texas. But feisty Austinites refused to turn over archival records, which remained in the city. For three years, the city languished, and the population fell precipitously. In the end, it was not Lamar who would save Austin; rather, it was Houston’s successor, Anson Jones. In 1845, the last president of Texas approved not only the capital's return to the banks of the Colorado River, but also the republic’s annexation to the United States. Austin Post columnist Kerr (Austin, Texas, Then and Now, 2004, etc.) engages deeply with his subject and offers a well-researched narrative, but general readers will likely not find all the details he provides—especially those pertaining to minor historical figures—equally interesting.
Best suited for an academic audience.Pub Date: July 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-89672-782-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Texas Tech Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2013
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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