Though clearly for Old West buffs, this is an enjoyable excursion.
A rip-roaring history of moving the mail in the wildest of the Wild West days.
As fans of Westworld know, it was big money that made the buckboards bounce and the transcontinental railroad chug from coast to coast. One big-money engine was Wells Fargo, the banking concern founded in the gold rush era by two owners of the American Express company in New York who saw in California the possibility of riches in moving wealth—literally—for other people. Thus it is, writes lawyer and former police officer Boessenecker (Texas Ranger: The Epic Life of Frank Hamer, the Man Who Killed Bonnie and Clyde, 2016, etc.), that “In the popular imagination, Wells Fargo is inextricably linked to stagecoaches.” Put a stagecoach or train driver and a shotgun together, stick a cash box onboard, and you’ll get robbers. The formula affords the author the opportunity to parade a catalog of good guys and bad guys across the story. Early on comes the admirable Wells Fargo pioneering rider Chips Hodgkins, who ran away from home, became an apprentice to a shipwright, and then moved to California to carry millions of dollars in gold over the course of a four-decade career. “He was so scrupulously honest,” writes Boessenecker, “that is was commonly said of him, ‘No man in the United States ever actually handled more money than he did, but not a nickel of it ever stuck to his fingers.’" Not so the likes of the desperado named “Rattle Jack,” who, shot to pieces in a robbery attempt, begged his fellow outlaws to kill him. They obliged, “and after tying a rope to his neck to make it look like he had been lynched, they tossed his body into the Russian River.” Also figuring in these pages are Wells Fargo lawmen like Jeff Milton, tough railroaders like Aaron Ross, and unsung bad guys like Ormus B. Nay. It’s a readable if old-fashioned exercise in criminal yarn spinning.
Though clearly for Old West buffs, this is an enjoyable excursion.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-18488-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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.
Atlantic senior 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
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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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