A first-rate investigation into a little-known episode of the Indian Wars. Although it raged for nearly a decade and cost a few hundred lives, Utah’s Black Hawk War is rarely mentioned in histories of the American West. In that war, a Ute elder named Black Hawk gathered an army of Utes, Shoshones, Navajos, and Paiutes and attacked Mormon livestock-raising settlements throughout central and southern Utah, determined to drive the ranchers from their country. The conflict was little advertised as it was happening, even within Utah, writes Peterson, in large part because the Mormon Church carefully disguised its existence; Brigham Young and other church leaders feared that the federal government would use the Indian uprising as a pretext to send in troops who, after the Indians had been properly chastised, might turn their attention to polygamists and other of the territory’s nonconformists. Quietly, then, Mormon militiamen battled Black Hawk’s people in a war that, Peterson holds, was “an anomaly in Western history.” It was an anomaly because in the territories bordering Utah frenzied campaigns against Indians were then being mounted (after a couple of miners were murdered in Colorado in 1863, for instance, federal troops slaughtered hundreds of Cheyenne and Arapahos in the Sand Creek Massacre), and by comparison Utah’s actions were conducted with much restraint. It was also an anomaly because Brigham Young’s agents, convinced that the Indians were somehow connected to the so-called lost tribes of Israel, sought to make peace at every turn and labored “to encourage the Latter-day Saints to lay down their vengeful feelings.” The frontier artist George Catlin, Peterson reveals, even went so far as to propose a grand Mormon-Indian alliance to battle the federal government as “mutual protection against the invading military forces which are entering the great Far West on every side.” That alliance never materialized. Neither, however, did the anti-Indian reprisals and vendettas that occurred elsewhere in 19th-century America. Although it is a lightly revised doctoral dissertation, Peterson’s book is accessible to—and highly recommended for—all readers with an interest in western history.
Pub Date: Feb. 15, 1999
ISBN: 0-87480-583-X
Page Count: 362
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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