A portrait of Progressive-era America that has much to teach us.
Biederman recounts the true story of a woman caught between worlds.
Agnes Young McAlpin was a Haida woman from Alaska at the turn of the 20th century. She was constantly pulled between the values of her community and Christian missionary attempts at assimilation. In 1899, she married the white dentist Kenneth McAlpin, who took her far away from her family and community to Butler, Pennsylvania. There, Kenneth struggled to begin his career, and Agnes suffered years of abuse, racism, and neglect from his relatives. After fleeing Kenneth and returning to Alaska with her youngest child, Agnes found her world altered by the death of her son Victor, who had stayed behind in Pennsylvania and died under mysterious circumstances. Her search to learn the truth about her son’s burial serves as the emotional core of the book. The story culminates in the couples’ 1906 divorce, where Kenneth claimed that his social standing had suffered from marrying a Native American woman. In the end, the case’s conclusion might surprise readers’ assumptions of 1906 America. In this meticulously researched story, Biederman integrates information from letters, church records, and newspapers to yield a richly detailed book that highlights Haida life, the assimilation projects of 1900s America, and the Alaskan gold rush. Biederman doesn’t shy away from the unavoidable realities of native-colonizer relationships, and she presents the consequences of racist policies unapologetically. Though it’s a nonfiction book, it often reads as a novel. Family drama, the divorce proceedings, and the social role of racism maintain a sense of suspense. As a historical drama, the work has a large cast that can be hard to keep track of, and the pacing can be uneven for the average reader. Historians will enjoy the shifts from detailed historical explanations to scenes of personal drama, but some readers may struggle with this back-and-forth. The book succeeds in rescuing Agnes Young McAlpin from obscurity and allowing her divorce case to be a lens through which we view racism, native-colonizer relationships, and domestic abuse.
A portrait of Progressive-era America that has much to teach us.Pub Date: July 16, 2026
ISBN: 9781476657332
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Exposit Books
Review Posted Online: yesterday
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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