A timely and powerful text that reverberates with the explosions of treasured American myths.
A spirited, scholarly analysis of the prominence of the gun in American history and mythology.
Bellesiles (History/Emory Univ.) combines the techniques and discipline of the historian with the skills of a felicitous journalist to identify the causes of the "astoundingly high level of personal violence" in the US. Using probate records and variety of other primary sources, he establishes that "gun ownership was exceptional" until after the Civil War. After a quick look at a couple of recent school shootings, Bellesiles dives into the river of history and demonstrates convincingly and eloquently that its current has not flowed in the direction that popular mythology would suggest. He reveals that the famous Kentucky rifle took about "three minutes to load”—and was highly inaccurate. From the Seven Years' War through the Crimean War, an estimated 95 percent of projectiles missed. He notes that during the Colonial period there was not a single manufactory of firearms in North America—and the notion that gun ownership was wide among American colonists is "a grand mythology"; prior to 1850, only about one-tenth of Americans owned guns. Few Americans resorted to hunting for food (trapping and animal husbandry were far more effective and economical), and "the vast majority of American males showed not the slightest desire to serve in the militia." Even American icons crack under the pressure of the author's relentless scrutiny: Eli Whitney apparently defrauded the government by supplying the military with "dreadful" guns and, during the War of 1812, "the militia . . . performed terribly, if at all." In the 1850s the creative advertising of Samuel Colt and the emergence of hunting magazines convinced people that "they needed guns in order to be real Americans," and by the 1870s "guns were everywhere in American life." To document his argument Bellesiles includes hundreds of endnotes, many with compelling supplementary comments and information.
A timely and powerful text that reverberates with the explosions of treasured American myths.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-40210-1
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
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 Yorker staff 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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