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 Yorker staff 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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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