A comprehensive, lucid, and often surprising history of western settlement in America.
Richly rewarding survey of the history of the frontier West.
“It is always easy to miss the obvious,” writes prolific historian West of what he considers to be its defining characteristic—namely, “its sheer energy and fluidity, movement and change of a degree that set it apart at the time and, arguably, from any time before or since.” As the author shows, the acquisition of the West, from the Texas Revolution to the wresting of the Northwest and Southwest from Britain and Mexico, brought so much territory to the U.S. that, if the same bonanza were to happen today, the nation would extend deep into South America. The American population tripled between 1800 and 1840, and a significant number headed west only to find that, even then, the myths of rugged individualism were thoroughly compromised by a cabal of corporatists and politicians. As he did in The Last Indian War and other books, West writes with an eye to irony and telling details. He notes, for instance, that John Wesley Powell’s groundbreaking classification of Native American nations and languages was but one more instrument of their captivity on reservations. While life for non-Whites was exceedingly difficult, White Americans could readily reinvent themselves. Among the greatest ironies the author uncovers is the fact that by the mid-1880s, ranching was “one of the most corporatized businesses in the nation,” with investment pouring in from the East and Europe. Though the Homestead Act—bitterly opposed by the South—did offer land to individual farmers and “enshrined an agrarian version of the ideal of free labor,” its success was mixed. Of lasting effect, in West’s view, is that where the disunion that led to civil war was furthered by lack of interregional communications, the postwar expansion of railroads, fast ships, and telegraphy created a superpower.
A comprehensive, lucid, and often surprising history of western settlement in America.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781496233585
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
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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