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REACHING KEET SEEL

RUIN'S ECHO AND THE ANASAZI

A journey into the homeland of the Pueblo peoples of the Southwestand into the center of the New Age. Saner, a poet (Climbing Into the Roots, 1976, etc.) and creative writing professor at the University of Colorado, has clearly spent much time in the Four Corners region. What he has learned there seems to be a kind of vague ecumenism, strongly stressing the religious superiority of prehistoric Native American traditions (religious traditions that are, in fact, largely unknown to us) and ancient ways in general, and a gnawing guilt for what, as he writes of a Hopi beggar, ``my kind have inflicted on his kind.'' In vignettes and brief prose-poemlike essays, Saner explores these sentiments, constantly looking for ``the other'' in storied desert places like Sedona, Keet Seel, and Chaco Canyon. He scores some nice points here and there, as when he ponders specimens of the modern ``idiot race''the defacers of monuments and stones, those who fill highway signs with bulletholes. But too much of this book is unsurprising; its meditations on coyote choruses, rafting trips, and wanderings among thousand-year-old ruins are the stuff of countless other books, many of them far better. It doesn't help that Saner uses as foils for his observations the kind of people you meet at tourist trapshippie wayfarers, bums, vendorsor that he seldom ventures into the difficult landscapes where, one presumes, true enlightenment occurs. Neither does it help that Saner is too given to little cotton-candy reveries. Celebrating the way in which Indian pottery seems powerfully maternal, he muses, ``Maybe that's why any potsherd I've ever wondered at under Southwestern sun has filled my body with an echo of the stillness I must've felt when yet inside my own mother.'' Such passages make one's teeth hurt. Only for readers who like their deserts with a soft edge.

Pub Date: March 31, 1998

ISBN: 0-87480-553-8

Page Count: 216

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1998

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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