A vivid, and corrective, study of a place better known for its transgressions than its ordinariness.
A rootin’-tootin’ history of the famed Western town.
Think of Deadwood, South Dakota, and you’re likely to conjure up an image of Wild Bill Hickok. Cozzens wisely opens with Deadwood’s most famed citizen, but with a few surprises—for one, that Hickok had given up his old gunfighting ways, his eyesight failing, and was attempting to make his fortune more or less legitimately in a town that, Cozzens writes, was “journey’s end.” Alas, he was gunned down in a saloon while playing cards. That’s fitting, perhaps, for, as Cozzens notes, Deadwood not only appealed to outlaws and drifters, but the town itself was “an outlaw enterprise,” founded against orders from the federal government to stay out of territory that was sacred to Native nations. Gold overrode such concerns, and in any event the government would soon wage war on those Native peoples. Deadwood spawned numerous characters who would become famous through popular culture (not least the HBO show of that name), among them the saloon keeper Al Swearingen and the prostitute Calamity Jane, as well as a madam, Mollie Johnson, who “genuinely loved baseball, and she enjoyed treating her girls between Deadwood and Fort Meade,” where the girls would relieve soldiers of their pay. Yet Cozzens demonstrates that, for all its reputation as a den of iniquity, Deadwood was, in the words of a visiting New York reporter, “a remarkably quiet, orderly, law-abiding town.” Some of that calm and prosperity came from deliberate action on the part of citizens who liked the place and wanted to make it something more than a mining camp. Today, of course, the town is a tourist draw—not least for its casinos—though its famed brothels were shut down years ago.
A vivid, and corrective, study of a place better known for its transgressions than its ordinariness.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2025
ISBN: 9780593537855
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
