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
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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