Though without the encompassing narrative fire of a Stegner or McMurtry, a pleasing contribution to the history of the...
History of the boom-and-bust cycles of the cattle industry in the wildest days of the Wild West.
Former Fortune magazine London bureau chief Knowlton knows a good business story when he sees it, and if the business of America is business, the nation’s business of the late 19th century was conquering the frontier and converting it into a feedlot and granary. The open-range cattle scramble lasted only a few decades, but it gave the larger world the stereotype of the cowboy as a “curious blend of American everyman and chivalrous Victorian nobleman,” with a hint of crusading knight thrown in for good measure. Among the figures who populate the author’s set pieces are Teddy Blue, who came as close to that ideal cowboy as anyone on the prairie, and the well-studied Teddy Roosevelt, who sought to expand his fortune as a rancher on the Dakota plains. Knowlton moves dutifully from topic to topic, from the technological developments of wire fencing here to the makings of sonofabitch stew there, enough to satisfy readers with a passing interest in the Old West but only wet the whistles of buffs. Readers raised on the revisionist histories of Richard White and Patricia Nelson Limerick may find Knowlton’s emphasis on Anglo cattle barons and necktie parties a little old-fashioned. The author’s background in finance comes in handy when he turns to the economics of cattle, perhaps the best single aspect of the book: “The price of shares in existing cattle companies declined sharply,” he writes of one episode involving protectionist legislation, “making it impossible for new cattle syndicates to be formed or for existing ones to make more money.” Knowlton’s account of the so-called Johnson County War, pitting big business against small “nesters” in Wyoming, is excellent, a story complete enough to make a book within a book.
Though without the encompassing narrative fire of a Stegner or McMurtry, a pleasing contribution to the history of the post–Civil War frontier.Pub Date: May 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-544-36996-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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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