A lucid, well-written work of regional history that opens necessary conversation and has broader implications—essential for...
A searching study of one of the American West’s signature massacres, distinguished by the multiethnic nature of its perpetrators and the legal case that ensued.
As Jacoby (History/Brown Univ.; Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation, 2001) observes, the so-called Camp Grant Massacre, which took place on April 30, 1871, outside of Tucson, “is neither the biggest nor the best known of the flurry of brutal massacres of American Indians that occurred during the closing decades of the nineteenth century.” What sets the slaughter apart was not its target—Apaches who, though accustomed to being killed on sight, had nonetheless come to a kind of accommodation with the U.S. government—but its planners, a group of Anglos, Mexicans and Mexican Americans who had various commercial and ideological reasons for wishing the Apaches dead. The bulk of the force, though, was made up of other Indians, O’odham people who called the Apache simply ’O:b, “the enemy.” Jacoby skillfully examines the mixed makeup and motivations of this force, walking the thin line between history and legend and the thinner line between sympathy and objectivity. The perpetrators of the massacre, which cost the lives of 150 Apaches, most of them women and children, earned renown nationally in a time of social Darwinist campaigns to deracinate Indians. Though tried for murder, they were swiftly acquitted. Jacoby seeks to assign authorship and responsibility in a time of endemic violence in the outback, but of putative civilization-building in the nearby cities. Longtime Southwesterners remember the massacre today, but it seldom figures in the history texts and in conversation, learned or otherwise. As Jacoby notes, even the descendants of the Apache victims seldom mention it, “out of respect for the…custom of not discussing issues that might exacerbate others’ despair.”
A lucid, well-written work of regional history that opens necessary conversation and has broader implications—essential for students of the American West.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59420-193-6
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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