Fast-paced and full of local politics and old-fashioned gunfights—a pleasure for fans of true crime and oaters alike.
Lively tale of a pioneering band of Texas Rangers and their adventures in a decidedly wild West.
James Brooks (1855-1944), the center of Pappalardo’s story, wandered into the Texas Rangers more or less by accident. Though in Texas for only a few years, he’d “already been a rancher, hired hand, mineral prospector, sheep farmer, aspiring groom—and nothing worked out.” At 27, he found a job that suited his “rootless disposition” and paid the satisfying sum of $45 per month as well as three meals per day. Brooks took to the job, which meant keeping order on the open range and trying to mediate conflicts among ranchers, farmers, and Native Americans, a complex tangle that eventually landed Brooks and two of his Rangers in jail, requiring a pardon from Grover Cleveland: “Backing the Texas Rangers…seems a risk-free way to send that message to intruding cattlemen and unwelcome settlers in the Indian Territories.” The author weaves an entertaining yarn about the long-lasting feud in the dense forests along the Sabine River on the Louisiana border, where an argument over hogs in a place called Holly Bottom led to numerous deaths, starting with what amounted to a double execution. Regarding that incident, a local paper wrote, “Yesterday a company of ten Rangers, in charge of Sgt Brooks, arrived here by rail and went into camp….Nothing can be learned of their mission. They are hunting somebody, and some developments will be made in a few days.” Those few days stretched out into years, and, as Pappalardo shows, lacked the neat resolution of most other Ranger operations—and, interestingly, still occasionally reverberate today. All of the author’s tales have many moving parts, and as he wryly notes at the end of the book, so many characters “require a cheat sheet” in the form of a dramatis personae that readers may want to consult it often.
Fast-paced and full of local politics and old-fashioned gunfights—a pleasure for fans of true crime and oaters alike.Pub Date: June 28, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27525-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlanticsenior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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