A revealing study from a forgotten theater of the war against Native America.
Deeply researched biography of an overlooked Native American leader.
When members of the Church of Latter-Day Saints—Mormons, as University of Nebraska historian Mueller colloquially calls them—arrived in Utah in the late 1840s, they encountered a Timpanogos Ute leader named Wakara, whom they called Walker. Wakara made a handsome living in two untoward trades: He was an accomplished horse thief, raiding far into California, and he traded in enslaved people. Wakara professed to convert through baptism, becoming “the first Utah Native to be ordained in the Mormon priesthood.” Many other Indigenous people, including a hundred of Wakara’s band, also converted. But when Mormon settlers began to encroach on Ute hunting and fishing grounds, fencing off traditional festival areas, Wakara mounted a war of resistance. Complications abound: Although Brigham Young wound up suing for peace, he waged a war against the Utes in which hundreds of Native people—mostly women and children—were massacred, even as the Indigenous rebels, for their part, killed plenty of settlers. And ironies abound: Although the slave trade was technically illegal and accounted immoral, the Mormons effectively took it over from Wakara, especially by bullying Paiute families into selling their children, who were then indentured “until they worked off the cost of their own purchase price.” Official Latter-Day Saints doctrine held that the Natives, or Lamanites, as they called them, were “white and delightsome,” but that did nothing to end the depredations. As Mueller observes, the Walker War ended following Wakara’s death: Possibly poisoned by arsenic that laced a gift of tobacco from Young, he was buried with two of his wives, two enslaved Paiutes, and a dozen horses, all slaughtered for the occasion. But the Utes and other Native peoples continued to suffer, converts or not, removed from fertile lands to inhospitable reservations and even, well into the 20th century, from national parks such as Arches.
A revealing study from a forgotten theater of the war against Native America.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781541602595
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
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
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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