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WHO OWNS THE WEST?

A graceful meditation, sometimes elegiac in tone, on the last days of the Old Mountain West and its replacement with a new myth. ``The interior West is no longer a faraway land,'' writes Kittredge (Hole in the Sky, 1992, etc.). ``Our great emptiness is filling with people, and we are experiencing a time of profound transition, which can be thought of as a second colonization.'' In that new colonization, fueled by well-heeled transients who have seen Legends of the Fall and A River Runs Through It one time too many, newcomers arrive in places like Choteau, Mont., and Moab, Utah, with money to burn, displacing the locals. ``People want to enclose our lives in theirs, as decor,'' Kittredge observes, and you can feel the resentment hanging in the clear blue western air. All the while, he says pointedly, the Native Americans smile and say, ``Now it's happening to you.'' The resentments, says Kittredge, are yielding events like the Ruby Ridge shootout and the Oklahoma City bombings. To stem them, he imagines a different kind of western myth: not of the place of Shane-like loners and a self-styled aristocracy that sees the land as a place to conquer- -men, Kittredge writes, like his own father, who carved out a farm from a pocket of southeast Oregon bottomland. In their stead, he argues, must come westerners who love the land ``because the story of your life has become part of the story of that place.'' Kittredge populates his pages with fellow dreamers, mostly writers like Raymond Carver and Richard Hugo, and even the airiest of his reveries touch ground in precise, epigrammatic observations: ``We are, most of us, ethnologists in our own house,'' he writes, ``working to locate ourselves amid the clutter.'' Longtime westerners—this book's real audience—will find many points to argue with in Kittredge's striking pages.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996

ISBN: 1-56279-078-1

Page Count: 192

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995

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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.

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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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