A treat for Western history buffs who don’t mind plenty of debunking along the way.
A rootin’-tootin’ history of the Wild West’s legacy of cold steel.
There’s something about Texas that makes a person reach for his gun. So hazards Texas historian Burrough, who finds in the Lone Star State a culture of both frontier violence and the social obsessions of the Old South, with a code that “in general required a man to be honest, courteous, brave, and prepared to use violence, even deadly violence, to defend his honor.” The first post–Civil War shootout was fought in Missouri between a Confederate and a Union veteran, the latter none other than Wild Bill Hickok; Hickok would of course meet his fate in South Dakota, but just about every other gunfighter—notably the “psychopath” John Wesley Hardin—cycled through Texas on the way to someplace else. Most fought in the Civil War, and while Burrough notes that gunfights were a fixture of the California Gold Rush, he puts the “Gunfighter Era” as taking place from 1865 to 1901. The big names are there, from Wyatt Earp to Butch Cassidy, but just as interesting are lesser-known figures such as the Texas rancher Clay Allison, “who may have been the frontier’s most feared gunfighter in the late 1870s and was likely the most unstable” but managed to avoid being gunned down by the brothers Earp in Dodge City. The Earps moved on to Tombstone, Arizona, a town full of Texas bad guys, and there engaged in the most famous gunfighter episode ever, the 30-second shootout at the O.K. Corral, most famous because best documented thanks to a remarkably comprehensive inquest. Along the way, Burrough writes of the mythmaking machinery of the pulps and Hollywood, the source of a flood of falsities, but he concludes—and this book helps in the task—that “the truth…tends to win in the end.”
A treat for Western history buffs who don’t mind plenty of debunking along the way.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9781984878908
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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 Yorkerstaff 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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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