A gripping story, this will appeal to adventure-seeking women in search of role models, although it suffers mightily from a...
An absorbing but overwhelmingly speculative tale of a Cheyenne woman who rode with Apache war parties and used her spirit-given powers to avoid enemy traps.
History—and legend—around the world is full of the stories of valiant women who used their brains, courage, charisma, and occasional magic to rescue their people from danger and despair. Diligent research on the part of scholars has often managed to separate the legend from the reality; Lozen falls somewhere in between. Apparently she did exist, and she did indeed travel with the warriors—particularly those led by her brother Victorio (a well-known Apache leader), but also with Geronimo. Although wives and even children often traveled with their men on war parties, Lozen was notable because she was unmarried and said to have been often invited into the councils of the leaders. The talents that gave her entrée included her ability to locate the enemy, to calm and control the horses (she was also known as “Dexterous Horse Thief”), and to heal. She could pinpoint her foes, it was said, by holding her hands up and turning in a circle. Her palms would begin to heat as she faced the direction of the enemy; the hotter they got, the closer “White Eyes” (US Army soldiers and scouts) were. After her brother was killed, her powers seemed to wane, but she continued to ride on revenge raids, killing many with both rifle and knife. She is believed to have died in Florida, as the Apache bands were being herded from reservation to reservation by the US government. Unfortunately, because so little verifiable material is available about Lozen, Aleshire (American Studies/Arizona State Univ.) is often reduced to inference and conjecture.
A gripping story, this will appeal to adventure-seeking women in search of role models, although it suffers mightily from a dearth of facts.Pub Date: April 16, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-24408-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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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