A thoroughly researched but plodding account of the clash of two implacably incompatible cultures.
Cultural historian Hutton (History/Univ. of New Mexico; Phil Sheridan and His Army, 1985, etc.) presents the sorry history of white America's persecution of the ferocious tribe that consistently returned their ill treatment measure for measure.
The story can be quickly summarized. In the early 1860s, a band of reservation Apaches was infuriated by yet another venal betrayal by genocidal white authorities. Under a series of leaders, they slipped away to roam the canyons of Arizona and New and Old Mexico, stealing livestock and gruesomely torturing and killing settlers. The U.S. Army pursued them, both sides suffered casualties, and the surviving Apaches, weary of the chase, surrendered to return to the reservation. Repeat periodically for 35 years until much of the tribe was exiled to Oklahoma. Felix Ward, the Irish/Mexican "captive boy" later known as Mickey Free, is the thread that runs throughout the narrative. Raised as an Apache, he spent much of his adult life working as a reservation policeman and scout for the Army, in which capacities he appears during much of this history without disclosing any sense of his personality. This is equally true of Hutton's vast cast of characters—native, Hispanic, and Anglo—who largely fail to emerge as distinct individuals. The accounts of armed conflict are stirringly told and often read like a Western thriller, but there are too many, with no sense of proportion; it seems there is no raid, patrol, or skirmish too minor to draw Hutton's attention. Furthermore, the author explains little of the culture of the geographically fragmented Apache people. The narrative unfolds almost entirely from an Anglo perspective, but very few individuals of any ethnicity emerge in a favorable light, with the possible exception of those Apaches who wished only to live quietly in whatever wasteland the whites most recently assigned to them.
A thoroughly researched but plodding account of the clash of two implacably incompatible cultures.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7704-3581-3
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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
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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