A useful survey of the “messy, complicated lives of the real people who built the West.”
A historian examines the forgotten figures—whole swaths of them—in the settlement of the Western frontier.
Every Western historian knows the name of Frederick Jackson Turner, who, in 1893, declared that the American frontier was closed. (It was just a year after Wounded Knee, after all, pretty well the closing shots of the American Indian Wars.) No one remembers Turner’s wife, Mae. Granted that she figures only slightly in Nelson’s narrative, Mae Turner is emblematic of the fact that women are often airbrushed out of Western history, apart from inevitable characters like Annie Oakley and Calamity Jane. Nelson restores women to history most vividly in her account of the Sonoran entrepreneur María Gertrudis Barceló, who settled in Santa Fe, at the upper reaches of New Spain, in 1815 and made a fortune as a saloon keeper, gambler, and businesswoman. Another of the seven chief players in Nelson’s account is the “Black Indian” Jim Beckwourth, a reliable go-between among white settlers and Indians along the Front Range of the Rockies until he made the unforgivable error of guiding a murderous militia to the site of a Cheyenne and Arapaho encampment that would give its name to the Sand Creek Massacre. Had he not, Beckwourth later told a group of Cheyenne leaders, “the white chief would have hung me.” The Cheyenne were unconvinced. Still another player in Nelson’s account was Polly Bemis, a Chinese immigrant who “embodied the characteristics of the white pioneer.” All were significant in their time, and all are largely forgotten today, and for various reasons, chief among them, by Nelson’s account, the flourishing of the myth of the frontier in Turner’s time and ever after, one that “whitened the West, and this transformation resulted in the oppression of Indigenous peoples, women of all races and ethnicities, and migrant communities.” While Nelson’s narrative sometimes plods, it makes a valuable corrective.
A useful survey of the “messy, complicated lives of the real people who built the West.”Pub Date: March 31, 2026
ISBN: 9781668004340
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
