An original and vibrant account of the Columbia River's hold on the imagination of individuals and cultures, Native American and European, who settled and explored its banks and imbued it with their disparate spiritual and material values. Clark (James Beard, 1993) weaves an often mystical, sometimes tragic tapestry beginning with the discovery of the New World and the ensuing European rush to plunder the continent, which transformed the lives of its native inhabitants. Vividly portrayed are such figures as David Thompson, a Hudson's Bay Company employee who discovered the Columbia's headwaters, and botanist David Douglas, who explored most of the Columbia River country south of Canada in search of unknown species of trees. Here too are Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, Christian missionaries who were killed along with 14 others at their mission near Walla Walla (in what would later be Washington state) in 1847 by the Cayuse, decimated by disease and resentful of continual impingement by white settlers. Clark recalls the influence of the Indian prophets Smohalla and Skolaskin, who frustrated attempts by US Indian agents and missionaries to pacify and regulate the dwindling number of indigenous people along the Columbia. Moving on to the 20th century, the author focuses less on the politics of dam building than on the escapades of Woody Guthrie, who through his songs helped the Bonneville Power Administration popularize the ideas of cheap electricity, plentiful irrigation water, and flood control, but who otherwise led an erratic, womanizing, and unhappy life. He concludes with recent court battles waged by Native Americans to regain their salmon fishing rights; the contemporary federal government comes off no better than the officials who repeatedly broke their treaties a century before. Told mainly through intimate glimpses into the past, this is a valuable addition to the body of works on the Columbia River region.
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-258516-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995
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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