Erudite and fascinating but occasionally too dense and difficult to follow.
There was a lot more to gaining independence from Britain than the Boston Tea Party.
Tangled is the operative word in Slaughter’s (History/Univ. of Rochester; The Beautiful Soul of John Woolman, Apostle of Abolition, 2008 etc.) finely researched, arduously plotted study, a tortuous progression of arrogant strictures by an out-of-touch motherland that only led to increasing colonial disgruntlement. The first immigrants to Cape Cod were an oppositional, authoritarian lot: middlebrow, family-oriented, forming “closed, corporate communities of believers, who accepted the covenant that bound them to each other and collectively to God.” As long as they were allowed to worship freely and practice their “acetic work ethic” and trade, they prospered, yet tensions grew into the early 18th century. These included a fear of Native Americans and outside influences, an opening up of a trans-Atlantic market economy, the French expansion to the north, sectarian fissures within New England forms of worship and even “a democratization of information” in the form of the proliferation of newspapers. Slaughter looks carefully at the influence on the colonies of Britain’s empire-making across the globe, from India to the Ohio Valley, Nova Scotia to the Caribbean. The defeat of the French at Plassey (Bengal) in 1757 and Quebec in 1759 allowed the British crown to turn its administrative attention to the colonies, especially in terms of much-needed revenue, yet checks in legal and economic policy (the nuances of which Slaughter draws in stultifying detail) only heightened the colonists’ paranoia and sensitivity. The author underscores the vastly different views about “independence” versus “separation” held by the British and the colonists. The British were bewildered by the colonists’ pursuit of “anarchy and confusion,” while the colonists were first and foremost deeply rooted in a sense of personal liberty of conscience above any act of government.
Erudite and fascinating but occasionally too dense and difficult to follow.Pub Date: June 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8090-5834-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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