Engrossing and authoritative, McDonnell’s rich history is academic in nature but welcoming to lay readers.
A history of the Native American tribes that inhabited the Great Lakes region during early American colonization.
The great tribes like the Iroquois, Sioux, and Huron are well-known to history, but there are still many lesser-known though equally important tribes that remain unrecognized for their vital influences in the development of the American Colonies. As McDonnell (History/Univ. of Sydney; The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia, 2007) makes clear, chief among these groups was the Anishinaabeg nation of the Great Lakes. Comprised of the Odawa, Ojibwa, and Potawatomi, the Anishinaabeg settled principally in Michilimackinac near the Strait of Mackinac, which separates Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. As a strategic chokepoint between the Great Lakes, Michilimackinac’s location had both spiritual and political significance to its people. Most notable among the Anishinaabeg’s geopolitical influence was their role in the development of the fur trade and supply chain that brought the prized pelts from the remote outposts of the American interior to French colonial settlements along the St. Lawrence River, crucially aiding the imperial efforts of the French crown. As a political force in the region, the Anishinaabeg’s influence was critical in forging allegiances during the Seven Years’ War, ultimately reshaping the imperial politics in the Americas. McDonnell skillfully captures the history of the group from the 17th century through the early 19th century, restoring the nation’s legacy and filling in a vital historical link in the timeline of the Americas—and the maps at the beginning help readers orient geographically. Though the Anishinaabeg were able to maneuver around many of the pitfalls that other Native American tribes suffered, such as alcoholism and the declining fur trade, they still could not stave off the inevitable forced removal from their lands by Euro-Americans.
Engrossing and authoritative, McDonnell’s rich history is academic in nature but welcoming to lay readers.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8090-2953-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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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