There’s some rehashing of the old but much that is new, making this a must-have for buffs—nothing world-changing but a...
Of cowpokes, desperadoes, and the law in a Western town in which it wasn’t always easy to tell which was which.
Dodge City, Kansas, was founded as a military outpost on the western reaches of the plains. It became a supply center, a railhead, and a stockyard—all adding up to a place into which people, mostly young men, drifted. As practiced popular historian and journalist Clavin (Reckless: The Racehorse Who Became a Marine Corps Hero, 2014, etc.) notes, some of those young men were downright dumb, and many of them drowned whatever intelligence they had with alcohol. A story unfolds: one night, Wyatt Earp, renowned tough-guy lawman just this side of being an outlaw himself, grabs a miscreant by the ear, like a schoolmarm. “If his companions had been smart, the arrest would have signaled it was time to call it a night—but they weren’t very smart,” writes the author. They tried to free their buddy by standoff and ambush and finally slunk off. The moment, and Clavin’s description of it, is characteristic: there’s kerfuffle and anticlimax, with perhaps less gun smoke than might be expected. The author paints a lively portrait of the town and its denizens, particularly those well-known enforcers. Along the way, he reveals a few lesser-known aspects of their characters, such as Bat Masterson’s Huck Finn–ish qualities, and he explicates the rules of faro, always helpful for understanding why the gaming table was often a flashpoint. There are even hints of revisionist history, as when Clavin notes the disproportionate number of African-American and other minority victims of violence: “The first recorded killing in the new Dodge City was that of a man known as Black Jack, because he was indeed a black man.”
There’s some rehashing of the old but much that is new, making this a must-have for buffs—nothing world-changing but a nicely spun Wild West yarn to satisfy even the most ardent consumer of oaters.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-07148-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
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
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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