A history that will startle and satisfy any reader with a taste for unvarnished realities of the Old West.
Pedestrian title notwithstanding, this is an engrossing, lively, and comprehensive look "beneath the skirts" of our national Western-colonialist myth.
Wright (What They Didn't Teach You About the American Revolution, not reviewed) throws a wide net—ranging from pre-1800 expansionist exploration east of the Mississippi to the personal histories of such mythic figures as Calamity Jane and Bill Hickock—with consistently crisp results. The author is an amusing writer with a dead-eye for trenchant or encapsulating detail, capturing the complex social codes and individualistic drives towards prosperity (or mere survival) in what appears as a nonconformist, morally equivocal West. In cleanly organized chapters (such as "Trails West" and "The Railroads"), Wright addresses the severe travails of frontier life (from wars between farmers and ranchers to the blizzards of the 1880s, which killed millions of cattle), the official expansionist imperatives that promoted both railways and Native American resettlement, and the circumstances (especially California gold fever) that lured many from the urbanized East. Yet, despite a sound national-historical compass, his portrait emphasizes the raw human qualities and nitty-gritty necessities of western settlement: the earthiness portrayed is reminiscent of such cultural touchstones as Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian or Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch, although Wright asserts that the real West was far less violent than commonly held (with the significant exception of government massacres of Native Americans, several of which are addressed in chilling detail). Despite Wright's good-humored reportage, subtle tones of fragility and impending mortality develop: as in the Pyrrhic conclusion of the Indian Wars (involving such atrocities as the assassination of Sitting Bull) and the grim denouements of folk archetypes like Belle Starr, Geronimo, and Wyatt Earp, one is left sensing the linkage between technology's dawn and the closing of the frontier—the "real West's" extermination—and the fuzzy, sentimental spawning of 20th-century cinematic mythologies, wrong-headed yet appealing.
A history that will startle and satisfy any reader with a taste for unvarnished realities of the Old West.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-89141-690-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Presidio/Random
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 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
© Copyright 2025 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.
