A skillful synthesis of historical research and contested narrative, resonant with enduring loss.
Sprawling account of the grim conclusion of the Indian Wars.
Historian Powers (Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to Al-Qaeda, 2002, etc.) notes that by adolescence, he’d learned that “the treatment of Indians was something people did not like to describe plainly.” Central to this narrative of concealment are two notorious events: the 1876 massacre of Gen. Custer’s command at the Little Bighorn, engineered by the fearsome Sioux warrior Crazy Horse, and Crazy Horse’s slaying a year later at a Nebraska military barracks where he’d surrendered himself voluntarily. With a scholar-obsessive’s attention to detail, the author reconstructs the entire milieu of the northern Plains in the 1870s, when the Sioux and other tribes were finding that the whites had no intention of honoring earlier treaties, particularly after the discovery of gold in the Black Hills (in present-day South Dakota). Powers takes an evenhanded approach to discerning how attempts at coexistence floundered. The soldiers and bureaucrats charged with managing Indian affairs were blinkered by the racist attitudes of the day—yet were often fascinated by Indian society and magnetic individuals like Crazy Horse—while the rigidity and confused negotiating style of chiefs like Sitting Bull made violent conflict inevitable. Gen. George Crook, the Civil War hero tasked with pacifying the northern tribes, respected Indians as fighters and wilderness experts, yet took their intransigence personally, especially following his unit’s defeat in a battle prior to Custer’s massacre and his miscalculation in pursuing Crazy Horse’s band without adequate supplies (his embittered men resorted to eating their horses). Following the Little Bighorn, even Crazy Horse realized that annihilation or acceptance of life on an agency, or reservation, were their only choices, and he surrendered his band to the Army in May 1877. Yet Powers assembles evidence that by September, Crook and rival Sioux chiefs were plotting his demise, for reasons which remain muddy to this day. The narrative is dense but always lucid, controlled and compulsively readable, raising thorny questions about the myth of Manifest Destiny.
A skillful synthesis of historical research and contested narrative, resonant with enduring loss.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-375-41446-6
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2010
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
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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