A well-reasoned challenge for future American historians to keep Native peoples on center stage.
A wide-ranging study that moves Indigenous peoples from the periphery to the core of continental history.
“Indigenous absence has been a long tradition of American historical analysis,” writes Blackhawk, a professor of history and faculty coordinator for the Yale Group for the Study of Native America. In recent years, this has changed thanks to the efforts of a new generation of historians to count marginalized groups such as women and ethnic minorities in the larger narrative. By the author’s account, American history represents an “epic encounter” between empires, Native and European, each conditioning the other. For example, pressures on the nations of the Iroquois Confederacy by British/American collision with the French Empire in North America pushed Iroquoian peoples into the Ohio River Valley, creating further conflict among Indigenous groups. In his lucid exposition, Blackhawk rightly notes, “while violence was an essential institution of colonialism, it was never enough to achieve permanent goals of empire.” While violence may have secured certain short-term goals, it introduced still more instability into an already unsettled situation that endangered everyone involved. “Once it is initiated,” writes the author, “none can predict its ultimate course.” Blackhawk locates some of the most fraught moments of westward expansion in the years of the Civil War, when a preoccupied Abraham Lincoln left matters of Native policy largely to his generals in the West, advocating instead an abstract program of “assimilation, land cessions, and eventual disappearance.” Violence naturally ensued, with new Native confederations such as alliances of the Sioux and Cheyenne against the U.S. Army leading to Little Big Horn. The author closes with an analysis of the doctrine of “termination,” which attempted to dismantle Native communities, assimilate their members, and steal away their treaty lands, plans that eventually failed. Even today, though, Blackhawk notes that conflict exists as interest groups attempt to erase “the hard-fought gains of the modern sovereignty movement.”
A well-reasoned challenge for future American historians to keep Native peoples on center stage.Pub Date: April 25, 2023
ISBN: 9780300244052
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.
The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.
According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy, which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.
A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9780063226562
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
SEEN & HEARD
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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