For lovers of the Wild West and its colorful history.
The former director of the Center for the American West at the University of New Mexico offers a biographical study of Calamity Jane and the narratives that have shaped perceptions of her remarkable life.
Born Martha Canary to a family of Missouri farmers in 1856, Calamity Jane is one of the great romantic figures of the Old West. Countless newspaper and historical accounts about her exist, but as Etulain (Lincoln and Oregon Country Politics in the Civil War Era, 2013, etc.) points out, much of that information is inaccurate. What is known for certain is that by the time Calamity turned 11, both parents were dead. How she, an illiterate girl on her own, managed to survive and care for her younger siblings remains a mystery. Evidence points to Calamity’s having adopted male clothing and manners, including a fondness for smoking and drinking. After almost a decade of living a transient’s life, she landed in Deadwood, South Dakota, where she became a celebrated associate of the legendary Wild Bill Hickok as well as a favorite topic of both journalists and dime-store novelists. Some accounts state that she also sold sex to survive and that during her brief time with Hickok, she became the legendary gunman’s lover and the mother of his child. Etulain, however, never advances these claims due to lack of conclusive evidence. Instead, he focuses on what can be verified, such as the fact that Calamity gave birth to a daughter long after her association with Hickok and that, while she lived with a number of men, only one ever became her husband. Etulain also spends considerable time looking at the many interpretations—novelistic, filmic and theatrical—that have sprung up about Calamity in the century since her death in 1903. While adding nothing new to her historical portrait, they have nevertheless demonstrated the extraordinary “staying power of Western legends” in public consciousness.
For lovers of the Wild West and its colorful history.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8061-4632-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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