Joining the crowded ranks of new books about General George Armstrong Custer's now mythic final battle in 1876 is this newfound eyewitness account by a private in the Seventh Cavalry, attached to Major Marcus Reno's command. Unearthed and edited by Martin, the director of the Western memorabilia department of a San Francisco auction house, Taylor's manuscript, completed five years before his death in 1923, vividly recounts the heroics of his badly outnumbered comrades and provides further evidence of Major Reno's incompetence and cowardice on the Little Bighorn. Reno, sent by Custer to flank a suspected Indian force, was attacked and fled the field. Taylor, despite losing his mount and his pistol, and with soldiers dropping all around him, managed to gain the bluff to which Reno's disordered force retreated. Trapped under a broiling sun with little water, surrounded by snipers, they listened to the fusillade of gunshots signaling Custer's last stand. While Taylor recounts such horrifying battlefield details as the mutilation of the bodies of dead soldiers by the Sioux, he speaks with great empathy of the Indians' plight. Upon seeing the body of a Sioux who had been scalped by soldiers, Taylor reflects, ``I could not help a feeling of sorrow. . . . He was within a few hundred rods of his home and family which we had attempted to destroy and he had died to defend.'' Some remarkable materials lend a homely power to Taylor's narrative: statements by army officers and Sioux leaders; period poetry about the battle; photographs of soldiers, Indians, and army scouts; and even a listing of such personal items as soldier's rings and watches recovered from Indians long after the event. This sweeping account by a surprisingly gifted writer is more than a battlefield epic; it is vibrant, living history that easily leaps the 120-year chasm between us and combatants that day at the Little Bighorn. (Editor tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-670-86803-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1996
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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