A readable and unfailingly interesting look at a slice of Western history from a novel point of view.
An iconic national park becomes the stage for a complex game of 19th-century politics.
The Yellowstone country was not well explored until the 1870s, writes historian Nelson, “hemmed in by four mountain ranges” and sprinkled with the bones of unlucky adventurers. It did not help that numerous Native peoples, including the Hunkpapa (which Nelson correctly renders as Húŋkpapȟa) Lakota under Sitting Bull, considered the Yellowstone territory to be theirs and took pains to keep interlopers out. Arrayed against these Indigenous peoples were several concerns. Montana’s territorial governor, Nathaniel Langford, was interested in the country on its own terms, but there was also business behind it; he was just one of many who wanted to push a northerly transcontinental railroad through the region. The author displays her strong commitment to including the Native presence in any account of Western history, but there’s another twist in this tale: Nelson links the policy of domination of Native peoples with the unfinished business of Reconstruction in the South, extending federal control over recalcitrant states and individuals. “Republicans in the early 1870s,” she writes, “saw both projects as part of a national ideal: to create productive and patriotic American citizens.” As Ulysses S. Grant and other leading Republicans knew, the South was no place they could look for votes, but the West certainly was. All that remained was to settle the West with likely Republicans by removing obstacles, geographical or human. By Nelson’s account, it’s no accident that Henry Dawes, a Massachusetts senator who was a strong advocate for the creation of Yellowstone National Park, was also the author of legislation that settled Native peoples not on shared domains but instead allotted each individual Native American a small plot of land, destroying cultural norms. Reconstruction may have failed, but in their effort to weaken the Native population, the Republicans were successful for decades.
A readable and unfailingly interesting look at a slice of Western history from a novel point of view.Pub Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982141-33-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2022
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1174
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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