A highly readable if not highly original history of the early interaction between Europeans and Native Americans. Recent history generally casts the European conquest of North America as a thoughtless or malicious genocide of the indigenous population. And while this is in some ways correct, the stress on American Indians' victimization at the hands of the invaders results in ignoring the Indians' contribution to the resulting American culture. While Calloway (History and Native American Studies/Dartmouth Coll.; The American Revolution in Indian Country, 1995, not reviewed) acknowledges that the European effect on Indian life was larger, and more devastating, than the other way around, he contends that Indian culture contributed in many significant ways to what would eventually become a distinctly American way of life. The author supports his thesis with many oft-cited facts about early colonial times. Few readers will be surprised when Calloway reports that Europeans settled in deserted Indian towns, looked to Indians to show them how to cultivate indigenous crops, or that not just corn and tobacco but also potatoes and tomatoes were discovered in the New World and introduced to Europeans as exports from the colonies. Not as well known is the respect many Europeans felt for Indian medicine, or that so-called ``Indian-style'' warfare—guerrilla tactics that the colonists were said to have adopted in their successful fight against the British army during the American Revolution—was in fact only invented by Indians a hundred years before to counter the unfamiliar tactics of European interlopers. Although much of the information here is well known, this is a fine primer on the cross-cultural influence of the Europeans and Indians in early American life. (21 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: March 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8018-5448-2
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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