by M.R. Montgomery ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2000
Styled more as an adventure narrative than a traditional history, an enjoyable romp with Lewis, Clark, and Pike, along with...
A good general history that portrays the Lewis and Clark expedition and the expeditions of Zebulon Pike as parts of a larger struggle to establish power in western America.
Montgomery, a journalist known for his meditations on fishing throughout the American wilderness (Many Rivers to Cross, 1995, etc.), turns his talents to the nation’s earliest explorations beyond the Louisiana territories. In addition to retelling the story of Jefferson’s commissioning of Lewis and Clark to find a portage between the Missouri and Columbia rivers, Montgomery details Pike’s less familiar expeditions to the headwaters of the Mississippi and into Spanish New Mexico. The Lewis and Clark expedition and the Pike one are presented in opposition to each other: Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark to expand US influence to the Pacific, whereas Pike’s journeys were ordered by General James Wilkinson in anticipation of the possible secession of the Louisianan territories (under Aaron Burr’s infamous leadership). Despite the disparate motivations behind the expeditions, Montgomery suggests that they both tried to conquer the territories through a spirit of aggressive adventure. This spirit earns the explorers the sobriquet of “gun-men.” The failures of Lewis and Clark to find a useful passage to the Pacific, and of Pike to incite a war with Spain, lead Montgomery to relate their stories in a bemused style. This tone deflates the cultural divinity imputed to the “gun-men” and suggests that the American West surrendered instead to the hard and unromantic work of the pioneers who would follow them.
Styled more as an adventure narrative than a traditional history, an enjoyable romp with Lewis, Clark, and Pike, along with an interesting introduction to the drama of Aaron Burr’s failed attempt to establish himself as emperor of the Louisiana territories. (6 b&w illustrations, 6 maps)Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-517-70212-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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