by Joseph M. Marshall III ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 12, 2004
A fine and necessary work.
The legendary Lakota leader receives due honor in this searching biography.
“Crazy Horse has been my hero since I was a boy,” writes Lakota author Marshall (The Lakota Way, 2001). He is not alone; as the author observes, Crazy Horse’s very “name floats in the consciousness of most Americans, along with the names of indigenous leaders and heroes from other tribes.” By Marshall’s account, Crazy Horse might have been surprised at his renown, which he seems never to have courted; he was of average height, perhaps average strength, and he did not participate in ritual bragging about his accomplishments. “As a matter of fact,” Marshall adds, “Crazy Horse barely talked about his exploits to his immediate family.” Yet Crazy Horse was always the right man at the right time, providing leadership and courage, appearing on the battlefield just when he was needed most. And he was often wanted; as Marshall writes, in one of the most effective stretches from the 19th century to the collapse of the Twin Towers, Crazy Horse’s nation was most certainly under attack, and “we are not immune to attack no matter how strong or invincible we think we are. Within the shadows of that lesson is one equally important: we must be prepared to defend ourselves.” Readers seeking war whoops may be a little disappointed by Marshall’s reticent treatment of the many battles in which Crazy Horse fought, especially the one that secured his fame, the Little Bighorn. But those seeking a circumstantial, from-the-native’s-viewpoint account of Crazy Horse’s life and death will be intrigued by Marshall’s respectful use of oral history, drawn from relatives who were very old when he was very young, and who filled his imagination with stories about the great warrior. As myths go, he hints, these are likely the most accurate—certainly more so than the “ ‘conqueror of Custer’ version, the purveyor of violence ready to fight at the drop of a ‘war’ bonnet,” or the many Hollywood Crazy Horses (“an eclectic bunch”), or the hagiographic Crazy Horse of Larry McMurtry and other recent biographers.
A fine and necessary work.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03355-3
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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 Yorker staff 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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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