An absorbing narrative history of bloody struggles for dominance over the once- pristine, vast, and rich Ohio River Valley and its thousand-mile river. In the Ohio Valley, Indian tribes had long warred among themselves until the fierce Shawnees took control. They would later oppose the French and British, newcomers who also contested each other for the great prize. Eckert (A Sorrow in Our Heart: The Life of Tecumseh, 1992, etc.) employs his novelist's skills by expanding well-researched accounts of historical characters, mined from letters, diaries, and anecdotes, into numerous episodic tales of exciting and sometimes tragic adventures. By providing a long prologue with a full historical background and at times ``reconstituting'' credible dialogue among people in briefly reported events, Eckert heightens the drama. He finds heroes and villains among the hunters, trappers, surveyors, soldiers, and hard-working pioneer families; Indians who believed in the white man's treaty boundary lines until the lines were overrun by hordes of claim-staking people from the East, attracted by freedom and the promise of a better life; British aristocrats and bureaucrats trying to rule from safe havens like Williamsburg but eventually losing control of the restless flow of people moving west. Senseless murders of both Indian and white families by a few criminals on either side grew into wars without mercy—fueled by fear, hatred, and vengeance—that killed Indian, British-American, and French in wholesale numbers. Including sketches of such figures as the young George Washington, Daniel Boone, and George Rogers Clark, Eckert takes us through the French and Indian War and the American revolutionary period to 1799, when, at last, peace came to the Ohio River Valley. Eckert's scholarship and style breathe life into the records of a turbulent time in the history of colonial America. (maps, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-553-09448-3
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1995
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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