Vividly describes the activities of fur traders but largely overlooks the effect on Native Americans.
Two authors team up for an exhaustive survey of the North American fur trade that focuses on how European explorers and entrepreneurs depended on Native Americans.
For three centuries, the fur trade dominated the New World’s economy as Europeans penetrated the remote corners of North America in search of pelts. But according to the authors, most historical works about this vital industry have portrayed Native Americans as a “hindrance to be managed, overcome and exploited” by Europeans. In this exhaustively researched book, the authors instead show that the fur trade actually “rested in the cradle of Indian culture”; the trade prospered only as it adapted to the lifestyles and traditions of aboriginals. With chapters devoted to different fur-trading regions across the continent, the book describes how white men borrowed freely from the natives, such as using their birch-bark canoes to navigate waterways. In present-day Wyoming, it was Crow Indians who told explorers Jedediah Smith and John H. Weber of “a country with streams so rich in beaver a man did not require traps to take them.” The book vividly documents white men’s interactions with such memorable characters as Chief Kwah of the Carrier tribe in British Columbia, who once held a knife to the throat of a British official who had hanged a Native American murderer. (Kwah’s wife successfully begged for the official’s life.) However, the book could have benefited from a more streamlined narrative, since the level of detail tends to obscure the authors’ theme. Some chapters take the European viewpoint the authors were trying to avoid. More importantly, the book largely overlooks how the fur trade affected Native Americans. The trade opened up North America to the white man but at a terrible price to its indigenous inhabitants. The authors describe how one trader bribed some Indians “with a barrel of whiskey made into two hundred gallons of Blackfoot rum,” but diseases, such as smallpox, that the white men brought with them are only briefly mentioned.
Vividly describes the activities of fur traders but largely overlooks the effect on Native Americans.Pub Date: March 11, 2012
ISBN: 978-1466262027
Page Count: 510
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 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
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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