A convincing history of Indigenous peoples’ deep integration into—and surprising influence on—European politics and culture.
This new perspective on Colonial history centers the experiences and cultural influences of Indigenous people.
By drawing on accounts of the many Indigenous people who traveled to Europe—by force or by choice—during the Colonial period between Columbus’ first contact in 1492 and the founding of Jamestown in 1607, Pennock, a professor of international history, develops a rich understanding of how these complex, varied people lived in the shadow of European imperialism. Across chapters on slavery, intermediation, families, diplomacy, and spectacle, Pennock considers the breadth of the Indigenous experience in Europe, ranging from people kidnapped and sold into slavery to high-status nobles arguing for their peoples’ rights in royal courtrooms. As the author demonstrates, these people “and the vast network of global connections they inhabited…sowed the seeds of our cosmopolitan modern world more than a century before the…pilgrims supposedly set foot on Plymouth Rock.” While each chapter establishes historical context in broad strokes, the detailed narratives of individual people are rendered as fully as possible, as the author decodes what little information exists in surviving shipping and property records, court documents, and journals. Reading between the lines of the colonizers' obfuscatory language, Pennock applies current knowledge of Indigenous histories and cultures to make some guesses about their lives while maintaining a high level of academic rigor. “Only by accumulating many tiny slivers of these lives, which touched so many but have seemingly made so shallow an imprint on western traditions, can we start to build a picture of the past that sees these travelers as they were—sometimes remarkable, and at other times mundane, but above all there.” In bringing these stories to light, Pennock creates a sharp challenge to Eurocentrism during the Colonial age. The author includes a timeline, two maps, and a glossary.
A convincing history of Indigenous peoples’ deep integration into—and surprising influence on—European politics and culture.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-524-74926-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
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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