A history of a little known 187374 expedition over a vast tract of Canadian wilderness by new police recruits, made to pacify Indians, monitor the long Canadian/US border, destroy the whiskey trade to the tribes, and bring law to Canada's wild west. Cruise and Griffiths (authors of several previous books, including The Money Rustlers, not reviewed) researched diaries, memoirs, newspaper accounts, and other period materials to recover the story of the motley collection of 150 men who made this forbidding 900-mile trek to frontier forts and trading posts in the unsettled Northwest Territory. They had been recruited with the promise of a good horse, extra rations, and an extraordinary opportunity for adventure. The rations, it turned out, were sporadic, and the horses only incompletely broken in, but they did get the adventure, in abundance. It was, Cruise and Griffiths remind us, from such ill-trained bands of adventurers that the renowned Royal Canadian Mounted Police evolved. The force, commanded by the inept British colonel George French, quickly found itself pushed to the limits of endurance by its leader's iron will, harsh discipline, and poor judgment. The men were plunged into a little-known and unforgiving land, peopled by militant tribes at constant warfare with one another. The recruits, during their long journey, endured intense heat, summer droughts, smallpox, grasshopper plagues, flying ants, vast prairie fires, and a subzero winter. The unforseen hardships resulted in desertions and mutinous incidents. After French bungled the mission, Major James MacLeod took command. A superb policeman and diplomat, he brokered the Blackfoot Treaty of 1877, which brought peace to the frontier, and wiped out the destructive whiskey trade, thus making possible both the growth of the territory and the emergence of the Canadian Pacific Railway. A well-told tale deftly combining adventure, outsize characters, and lively scenes of a wild land in the process of being explored and settled. (11 photos, 11 line drawings, not seen)
Pub Date: May 26, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-15538-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1997
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
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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