A useful tonic to a literature suddenly full of books on Lewis and Clark, but with only passing references to those who came...
A fine history of a French family that enjoyed great influence—and deservedly so—in the early trans-Mississippian West.
In this ballyhooed bicentennial year of the Corps of Discovery’s departure for the Pacific, it may surprise some readers to learn that Lewis and Clark traveled in territory already heavily traversed, mapped, and studied by other whites. When they entered the lands ceded to the US under the Louisiana Purchase, writes former New York Times Latin America correspondent Christian, they knew almost nothing about the region. “But William Clark, thanks to the path opened in the Illinois country by an older brother some twenty years earlier, knew an important person in the little French Creole village of St. Louis. . . . The name of the man was Chouteau, which neither Clark nor Lewis could spell.” It was largely through the good works of the aristocratic brothers Pierre and Auguste Chouteau, writes Christian, that the Corps was able to pass unhindered through a huge swath of territory, which was terra incognita to them but quite familiar to generations of French and French Canadian trappers, miners, and traders. “The Chouteaus,” Christian asserts, “had worked to create an environment where Indians generally respected white men and believed they could be trusted.” Regrettably, she adds, the American government seemed unaware of past relationships “that had existed for generations,” and American agents, administrators, and soldiers swiftly broke the peace; Christian usefully notes that in the Louisiana Purchase territory under Spanish rule, not a single Indian was killed or executed by soldiers, whereas wholesale war was the hallmark of the American presence there. That more Indians and whites did not die on the frontier was also due to the Chouteaus and their descendants, who helped negotiate important treaties that the Americans broke again and again.
A useful tonic to a literature suddenly full of books on Lewis and Clark, but with only passing references to those who came before them.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-374-11005-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
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
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