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
Categories: HISTORY | FIRST/NATIVE NATIONS | GENERAL HISTORY
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BOOK REVIEW
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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