The research seems sound enough, but one-dimensional characters and consistently clumsy prose doom this first of a series....
Chunky, clunky debut novel about a one-time slave who fights Confederates, injustice, ignorance, racism, Native Americans, whatever—all superheroically.
Larger than life, that’s Sergeant Major Nate Gordon of the Tenth US Negro Cavalry. Physically, he’s imposing. Metaphorically, he doesn’t lose an inch. It’s 1866, and the bitter, bloody War Between the States has finally wound down. Nate, once a desperate runaway, has performed brilliantly as a Union soldier and was denied a commission solely on the basis of color. The vagaries of discrimination aside, Nate loves the army. Now, he’s on detached service, charged with recruiting for the recently formed Ninth US Negro Cavalry. Setting about the task in his customary brisk and efficient manner, he accomplishes wonders, overcoming obstacles that would daunt a lesser man. Such as: corrupt officers, resentful brothers-in-arms, a rabble of ex-rebels who know in their bones that the Emancipation Proclamation was not merely misconceived but misbegotten. Unflappable Nate copes with everything from an ugly mutiny to a rampant black market. Back with the Tenth, he prepares for his new role as Indian fighter. In Cheyenne country, he meets the Dog Soldiers, led by the warrior chief Cougar Eyes, a fierce and implacable enemy, but one from whom he earns grudging admiration and a respectful nickname: Buffalo Gordon he is from that time forward. He also meets the irresistible Cara, half-Mexican, half-Indian, all winsome female, for whom he falls head over heels. Five-hundred-plus pages of murder, betrayal, endless victories, occasional setbacks, ample servings of graphic sex, and at the end Nate’s still Nate, unchanged and in fact immutable. That’s because he was perfect to begin with.
The research seems sound enough, but one-dimensional characters and consistently clumsy prose doom this first of a series. There may be a story worth telling here, but the grandson of Sinclair Lewis hasn’t found it yet.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-87376-X
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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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