by Ted Morgan ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1995
Stuffing a massive subject—in this case, the Anglo-American conquest of North America over the last two centuries—between the covers of a single volume is like teaching a cat to heel: It's a neat trick, but necessarily one of limited utility. Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist Morgan continues his history of North America, begun in Wilderness at Dawn (1993), with this volume of narrative history on the making of the United States, beginning with the explorations of the American West at the time of the Louisiana Purchase and ending with the admission of Alaska into the Union. Along the way, usefully, he introduces forgotten characters like Manuel Lisa, the New Orleansborn Spaniard whose early 19th century explorations of the Platte and Missouri rivers opened the West to the fur trade; points out the injustices inherent in conquest, such as the case of a California Mexican whose suit against an invasive Anglo was dismissed on the grounds that the plaintiff was a ``greaser''; and draws in apposite, and overlooked, contemporary observations on the cultural makeup of the West, such as A. Leland Jamison's mot that ``Mormonism is at once an irreconcilable Christian heresy and the most typical American theology yet formulated on this continent.'' Morgan is a solid writer with a good command of his materials, unafraid to paint pictures with broad strokes. Regrettably, he falls short on interpretation, breezing past the important ``new historiography'' propounded by scholars like Patricia Nelson Limerick, Ekkehart Toy, and William Cronon, and even giving too little attention to such brahmins as H.H. Bancroft, who, a century ago, pointed out what Morgan seems reluctant to admit: that the conquest of the West largely served the interests of merchants, industrialists, and developers. Readers searching for a critical, scholarly treatment of frontier history should look elsewhere. Still, despite its limitations, for general readers Morgan's volume serves just fine. (maps, b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-671-79439-6
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
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 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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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