A superb addition to the history of the late colonial era and Revolution.
A scarifying, blood-soaked portrait of savagery on the early frontier—much of it committed by European settlers.
Parkinson, a historian of the American Revolution and the author of Thirteen Clocks, is a careful reader of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which, as the title suggests, he transposes to the mid-Appalachian frontier. There, Conrad’s vision of heads impaled on stakes and relentless massacres would slot in neatly as a study in terrors committed out of sheer greed. The Kurtz of the piece is a settler named Thomas Cresap, who lured a family of Mingo men, women, and children to a meadow alongside the upper reaches of the Potomac River and murdered them. Doing so made Cresap a sort of colonial folk hero, but it entangled him and his family with the families of his victims for decades and led to his being called out explicitly in a famed piece of Indigenous oratory known as “Logan’s Lament.” If Cresap, who “would later be nicknamed the Maryland Monster,” stands at the dark center of the Appalachian colonial universe, Parkinson’s story extends to include dozens of people drawn into the fight, from Thomas Jefferson and George Washington to British generals Thomas Gage and Edward Braddock. The author also uncovers little-known moments in colonial history: a proto-civil war, for instance, between residents of Maryland and Pennsylvania, and a horrific episode in which Indigenous allies of the French captured one loyal to the British and “killed, boiled, and ate him.” Parkinson’s players, Native and European alike, are “bewildered,” the ground constantly shifting under their feet, alliances forming and crumbling, friends indistinguishable from foes. In the fog, other slaughters followed—and in them, intriguingly, Parkinson locates the first glimmer of the colonists’ decision to shake off British rule by force.
A superb addition to the history of the late colonial era and Revolution.Pub Date: May 28, 2024
ISBN: 9781324091776
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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