A wide-ranging account of events in American history, as briefly reported and commented on by a plethora of eyewitnesses—from the Aztec-Spanish confrontation in 1519 to the rise of the aerospace industry and Silicon Valley in the 1990s. Editor Colbert (Eyewitness to America, 1997, not reviewed) has mined letters, diaries, interviews, and public writings to collect more than 150 short essays by contemporary observers of every period of American history. Colbert contends that Americans went to the West for many reasons: they were angry or dissatisfied, they needed to escape creditors, they wanted adventure, they were seeking religious freedom, they wanted to make a quick buck, to be their own boss, to become a landowner, miner, businessman, or missionary. You name it. The frontier has always stood for freedom in the American imagination, even as the frontier itself shifted: “West” could mean Rhode Island back in 1636 when Roger Williams left the Massachusetts colony to gain religious freedom. Some of the eyewitnesses—like Washington, Jefferson, Davy Crockett, Sam Houston, and the travelers Oscar Wilde and Rudyard Kiplingñwere famous or became so, but many were obscure figures who had the good luck to be standing in the right place at the right time or were simply good storytellers. Great events like the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the upheavals in the US during WWII are covered, as are lesser-known episodes such the great earthquake of 1811 (which briefly reversed the flow of the Mississippi River) or the history of the Mormon settlements. A good introduction: Colbert gives us quick-moving, multi-themed snapshots of US history and Americana that educates, entertains, and more than makes up in breadth what it lacks in depth. These colorful historical hors d‘oeuvres may help to create an appetite for more complete main courses in American history for both students and general readers.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88103-1
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1998
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 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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