Of some interest to history buffs, though as a supplement to weightier books on Custer and Little Big Horn, including...
A familiar story peppered with little-known insights into the workings of a family whose name has become a byword for foolhardy behavior.
When George Armstrong Custer went ill-advisedly into that coulee in Montana nearly 150 years ago, it wasn’t just he and his command who died. As popular historian Yenne (Operation Long Jump: Stalin, Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Greatest Assassination Plot in History, 2015, etc.) writes, Little Big Horn cost two Custer brothers who had ridden with George as well as a brother-in-law and a nephew—a significant portion of that generation of Custer men and a lineage that has all but disappeared following the deaths of descendants to causes ranging from suicide to old age. Much of the story will be known to students of Civil War history and the American Indian Wars, to say nothing of Custerologists; still, Yenne spins the tale accessibly. As he writes, Custer was always a skin-of-his-teeth fellow who was loyal to his men and he to them; several of the soldiers who died with Custer also fought with him as members of his Michigan cavalry regiment during the Civil War. There’s a touch too much speculation to please academic historians (“Nevin Custer might have been at this meeting. The parents of the Custer boys, Emmanuel and Maria, may have been there as well, but Maria was in poor health and the death of three sons would probably have laid her low and rendered her housebound”), and the best part of the book is the slender closing section that deals with the fates of various Custers in the aftermath of Little Big Horn, from the resourceful Libby to the now-forgotten, quiet brother who preferred to stay on the farm rather than follow his siblings to glory.
Of some interest to history buffs, though as a supplement to weightier books on Custer and Little Big Horn, including Nathaniel Philbrick’s The Last Stand and Evan Connell’s Son of the Morning Star.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5107-3034-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
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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