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IRA HAYES

AKIMEL O'ODHAM WARRIOR, WORLD WAR II HERO, AND LEGEND

A strong contribution to the literature of World War II, Native American warriors, and the unseen wounds of war.

Searching study of the psychically scarred Native American Marine Corps hero made famous for raising the American flag on Iwo Jima.

“He received more press than Geronimo, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Cochise, and Tecumseh combined.” So writes Holm, a Marine combat veteran of Vietnam and retired professor of American Indian studies, of Ira Hayes (1923-1955), caught both in Joe Rosenthal’s iconic photograph and its replication in the Marine Corps War Memorial in Washington, D.C. Hayes was also caught in the maze depicted in the iconography of his Akimel O’odham people, its middle-way ideals disrupted by war; that maze found him suffering horribly from PTSD and the self-medication of alcohol. Although the Akimel O’odham were considered “a peaceful people,” largely because they did not rise up against the American conquerors of their homeland, they had a tradition of warfare. However, writes the author “the Akimel O’odham way of war was a complex amalgamation of preparatory rituals, limited aggression, the ceremonial expungement of the pollution of death, healing, and the celebration of the return of the relatives who took part in the conflict.” Thrust instead into boot camp, jungle warfare, the horrific battle for Iwo Jima, and unwonted fame for anchoring the six-man chain that raised the American flag over Mount Suribachi, Hayes returned to poverty on a reservation just a generation away from a horrible famine wrought by water-greedy white farmers in the Arizona desert. Hayes would say “that he wished the picture had never been taken,” and after the war, adrift, he was at home nowhere. Holm argues that the “drunken Indian” image so often presented in popular culture is both false and demeaning. Some of his assertions are obvious—e.g., war is formative, scarring, and hellish—but he convincingly depicts Hayes as a gentle, unwilling “victim of circumstance” who coped with his troubled life the best he could.

A strong contribution to the literature of World War II, Native American warriors, and the unseen wounds of war.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2023

ISBN: 9781538709504

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Twelve

Review Posted Online: June 28, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Awards & Accolades

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  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2017


  • New York Times Bestseller


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  • National Book Award Finalist

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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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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