An unusual and important approach to an uneasy history.
A grisly but well-executed compendium of the extreme cruelty practiced by American Indians and settlers alike during the 268 years of the Indian Wars.
Retired attorney Osborn’s debut turns a sharp eye on contemporary idealization of pre-Diaspora American Indians as peaceful and holistic; he argues instead that war-loving Indians mounted violent intertribal campaigns, even before the 17th-century arrival of European interlopers. Tribal society emphasized an individualized “warrior” culture in which personal status was earned through aggressive attack, followed by rape or ritualized torture of any unfortunate survivors. Among the white men, peculiar strains of Puritan vengefulness (and, later on, notions of Manifest Destiny) frequently spurred European settlers to similarly gratuitous atrocities in response to the earliest Indian aggression—as in King Philip’s War (1675–78), in which approximately 1,000 settlers were killed by the Wampanoag Confederacy and during which “the Puritans distinguished themselves by wholesale massacres of noncombatants.” The author explores how minor cultural conflicts escalated into prolonged cycles of violence that resulted in many deaths, epitomized by the Santee Sioux Uprising of 1862 (when a theft of eggs escalated into a mass attack in Minnesota that left at least 700 settlers dead). Although Indian resistance on the frontier surged during the Civil War, this same era was notable for Army massacres of civilians and prisoners under government “protection.” These instances deepened the hostility of such tribes as remained intact, culminating in the 1876 loss of Custer’s entire command at the Little Big Horn (where victorious warriors committed corpse mutilation, as was customary). Osborn modulates this river of rage and gore by examining important human subtleties of the Indian Wars (such as the nature of its participants’ hatred and revenge-lust) and the strange fates of kidnapped settlers (who might be tortured to death, but could just as likely be inducted into the tribe).
An unusual and important approach to an uneasy history.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-50374-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2000
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
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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