by Neil Van Sickle Evelyn Rodewald ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 11, 2012
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
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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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by David Gibbins ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2024
Gibbins combines historical knowledge with a sense of adventure, making this book a highly enjoyable package.
A popular novelist turns his hand to historical writing, focusing on what shipwrecks can tell us.
There’s something inherently romantic about shipwrecks: the mystery, the drama of disaster, the prospect of lost treasure. Gibbins, who’s found acclaim as an author of historical fiction, has long been fascinated with them, and his expertise in both archaeology and diving provides a tone of solid authority to his latest book. The author has personally dived on more than half the wrecks discussed in the book; for the other cases, he draws on historical records and accounts. “Wrecks offer special access to history at all…levels,” he writes. “Unlike many archaeological sites, a wreck represents a single event in which most of the objects were in use at that time and can often be closely dated. What might seem hazy in other evidence can be sharply defined, pointing the way to fresh insights.” Gibbins covers a wide variety of cases, including wrecks dating from classical times; a ship torpedoed during World War II; a Viking longship; a ship of Arab origin that foundered in Indonesian waters in the ninth century; the Mary Rose, the flagship of the navy of Henry VIII; and an Arctic exploring vessel, the Terror (for more on that ship, read Paul Watson’s Ice Ghost). Underwater excavation often produces valuable artifacts, but Gibbins is equally interested in the material that reveals the society of the time. He does an excellent job of placing each wreck within a broader context, as well as examining the human elements of the story. The result is a book that will appeal to readers with an interest in maritime history and who would enjoy a different, and enlightening, perspective.
Gibbins combines historical knowledge with a sense of adventure, making this book a highly enjoyable package.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781250325372
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
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