This sprawling and undocumented book is the biography of Sir William Drummond Stewart, an eccentric and quarrelsome Scotsman who in the 1830's made many journeys through the American Far West, with fur-trading and hunting expeditions, and who later returned to his ancestral home. Born in Murthly Castle, Perthshire, in 1795, the second son of the Fifth Baronet of Murthly, William Drummond Stewart served under Wellington, fought at Waterloo, and in 1820 retired to Murthly, where he had an illegitimate son by a self-effacing girl whom he married to legitimize the boy. In 1832 after a violent quarrel with his elder brother, who had inherited the title, he came to America, to spend years in the West with trappers and fur-traders. He brought the Indian painter, Alfred Jacob Miller, to the West; he hunted big game, collected plants for the Murthly gardens, made cotton-buying trips to New Orleans, and sent live buffalo to his British friends. Inheriting the title, he returned to Murthly, to build Catholic shrines, quarrel with his relations, and adopt an unpleasant American boy who, after Sir William's death in 1871, looted Murthly of most of its treasures. The best part of this book is that dealing with Sir William's life at Murthly, which is of little interest to American readers; the rest of it is devoted to a repetitious and shopworn account of the fur trade in the 1830's, in which Sir William is often lost in a mishmash of unverified conjectures and unrelated details taken from unspecified sources.
Pub Date: May 1, 1963
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Hastings House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1963
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 Yorkerstaff 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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