An expert chronicle of the final triumphs and troubles of the Cherokee Nation before its integrity was destroyed by the US Congress in the 1880's—and the crowning achievement in the distinguished career of the late McLoughlin (History and Religion/Brown). Forced in the 1830's to abandon ancestral lands in the Deep South, the Cherokees suffered terribly on the Trail of Tears but arrived in their new home west of the Mississippi with their national identity largely intact. Led by the mixed-blood John Ross, they encountered hostility from Cherokees already established in the area, and a bloody factional struggle ensued that was settled only by treaty in 1846. Rebuilding what they had lost during their removal, the unified Cherokee Nation established schools, farms, and towns, becoming stable without much help from Washington. But resentment of prospering, English-speaking mixed-bloods by more traditional (and poorer) full-bloods—who saw their heritage imperiled by the former's assimilationist tendencies—was fanned by the sectarian slave crisis in the US. Further bitter infighting erupted as Cherokees took sides during the Civil War and, after Ross's death in 1866, no leader of his stature emerged to safeguard sovereignty as successfully as he had. Under increasing pressure by railroad and other interests, the Cherokees saw their internal division continue to fester, ultimately leaving them unable to resist demands that their new homeland be turned into a territory for settlement. Tightly focused and painstakingly detailed, as well as deeply sympathetic: the definitive history of the Cherokees in their desperate last stand against white encroachment.
Pub Date: Jan. 14, 1994
ISBN: 0-8078-2111-X
Page Count: 470
Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1993
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 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
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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