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
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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