A whopper of a history giving equal credit to the Rangers’s legendary gallantry and the accompanying brutality.
Cox (Texas Disasters, 2006, etc.) follows the 19th-century evolution of “a mostly volunteer Indian-fighting force,” founded in a remote province that was still part of Mexico, into “a paramilitary arm of the government” and then “a frontier law enforcement agency.”
During his 15 years as public-affairs spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety, the author enjoyed unlimited access to the documented records of the Texas Rangers. Now an Austin Statesman columnist, he combines that material with memoirs, anecdotes from descendants and irresistible apocrypha to chronicle the Rangers’s first 79 years. (A planned second volume will take them from 1900 to the present day). It reads like an amalgam of every Western movie ever filmed: Indians hold the high ground, but the vastly outnumbered Rangers charge and win; bandits hold up stagecoaches and are pursued by implacable Rangers; etc. Yet for much of the 19th century, the Rangers had less to do with law enforcement than with frontier security. The fierce, proud Kiowas and Comanches had been nomadic hunters for millennia; buffalo didn’t recognize a boundary between the Republic of Texas (1836–45) and U.S. Indian territory. For struggling frontier settlers, any Indian hunting party was a “depredation” waiting to happen. Escalation could be instantaneous; a warning shot begot a burned cabin, men killed, women and children taken captive. For a half-century or more, the Rangers were first responders in these situations, sporting badges handcrafted from Mexican five-peso pieces. Each side took scalps and inflicted physical terror on the other. Rangers could be drawn into ambushes, and at times they mistakenly attacked peaceful tribes. But particularly after the Civil War, real men who could drop an enemy from several hundred yards with a rifle were almost all the law there was in Texas. Cox fleshes out their true-life adventures with mundane realities like chronic underfunding due to public ingratitude.
A whopper of a history giving equal credit to the Rangers’s legendary gallantry and the accompanying brutality.Pub Date: March 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-87386-8
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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