A wonderful account that reveals as much about us as it does about the colorful man who is its subject. (132 b&w...
A fine, entertaining, scholarly study of one of the beloved (if, until now, little-understood) figures of American history—and of how he affected our image of ourselves.
Mention the name “Buffalo Bill” (born William F. Cody), and a great circus-like show, with Indians and gunfighters, comes immediately to mind. According to Kasson (History/Univ. of North Carolina), that image constitutes only a fraction of Cody’s influence upon American culture. In her captivating study, she is not content merely to give us a fresh biography of the man who was a writer of dime novels, a great showman, an energetic (if often frustrated) businessman, one of the nation’s first celebrities, and (believe it or not) a figure of the 20th century. She also reveals the extraordinary influence and following he had among millions (including Queen Victoria), both here and abroad. It was Buffalo Bill’s shows that indelibly inscribed on people’s minds their image of the American West, of its native inhabitants, and of human character on the western trail. Cody’s appeal and success seem almost foreordained, for his showmanship owed as much to his times as it did to his skill in sensing what his contemporaries wanted. A veteran of the Civil War and the Indians campaigns, Buffalo Bill (in Kasson’s view) offered authenticity to Americans fearful about the closing of the frontier, the rise of cities and industry, and the decline of individual freedom. Here was a man of courage and integrity (he fought for us), a democrat of sorts (employing Sitting Bull and Annie Oakley with dignity and respect), and a self-made entertainer who, like P.T. Barnum, purveyed much bunkum while putting on a plain good show. One of Kasson’s most significant contributions is her explanation of what today’s world of entertainment, as well as our era’s packaging of history as fun, owes to this single figure.
A wonderful account that reveals as much about us as it does about the colorful man who is its subject. (132 b&w illustrations, not seen)Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8090-3243-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
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 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
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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