Lucid and accessible, even as the author tracks a multifaceted, ultimately tragic tale.
Illuminating study of that least-known of America’s Indian wars, which made Illinois safe for corn and industry.
As historians such as Jill Lepore and Charles Mann are ever more plainly demonstrating, white/Indian conflict was more complex than the old grand narrative has it. Trask (History/Univ. of Wisconsin-Manitowoc) adds materially to this new history with this engrossing study of the Black Hawk War of 1832, when Sauk Indians driven west by white expansion into Illinois and Iowa abruptly turned back and fought a desperate guerrilla war that briefly looked as if it might succeed. As Trask shows, the war had several proximate causes: The Sauk found themselves pressed up against the Menominee and Sioux, who pushed them back toward the pale of white settlements. The Army had been demobilized, so that the frontier was staffed by a handful of men who were satisfied with “bad food, slavish labor, harsh discipline, social isolation, and the general absence of respect granted to soldiers by the society as a whole.” The Sauk considered the militia to be just as worthless. And under the leadership of elders such as Black Hawk, the Sauk stayed off liquor and were culturally conservative, which bound them together come time to fight. Fight they did, destroying farms, mines and other settlements along the Mississippi until poor weather, illness and superior enemy arms broke them. At turns, Trask reveals characters who will turn up at other points in American history: Jefferson Davis, Philip St. George Cooke, Alexander Hamilton’s son William and Black Hawk himself, his name now preserved in that of a hockey team. He also links his unhappy narrative of war to a curious “national identity crisis” that pitted sympathetic northeastern types against frontier people who would just as soon kill Indians as look at them—an early hint of the red state/blue state division.
Lucid and accessible, even as the author tracks a multifaceted, ultimately tragic tale.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2006
ISBN: 0-8050-7758-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2005
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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