A delightful history, reminding readers that while noble ideals led to the settling of the United States, the fur trade paid...
The fascinating story of the fur trade, full of heroism, greed, violence and political conflict.
Historian Dolin (Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America, 2007, etc.) begins with a mild surprise: The pilgrims yearned for religious freedom but financed their voyage by agreeing to work for seven years to pay back, mostly in pelts, their English sponsors. “The Bible and the beaver were the two mainstays of the young colony,” wrote historian James Truslow Adams in The Founding of New England. Later, as settlers moved west, they entered lands well explored by preceding trappers, and America’s first multimillionaire, John Jacob Astor (1763–1848), made his fortune by sweeping up much of the fur trade from coast to coast. The first California rush was not for gold in 1848 but sea otters after 1800, quickly followed by fur seals. Although the American bison provided meat, it was the market for their coats that drove the massive slaughter. Dolin ends his riveting narrative with the last documented hunt for buffalo skins in 1887. While rising conservation movements stimulated the first legal limits on hunting, the author points out that their aim was to preserve the dwindling animals so that the fur trade could continue. Nevertheless, the laws worked, transforming America from a net exporter to an importer of furs.
A delightful history, reminding readers that while noble ideals led to the settling of the United States, the fur trade paid the bills.Pub Date: July 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-393-06710-1
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010
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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