A comprehensive and copiously documented survey of 300 years of Spanish colonial activity along its northern outposts in the New World, from Weber (History/Southern Methodist Univ.). Concerned with the dynamics of a Spanish presence in the North American Southeast and Southwest across the centuries, Weber both pays homage to and distinguishes his history from the ideas of Herbert Eugene Bolton, who since the 1920's has been considered the preeminent authority on the Spanish influence in North America, and whose vision of settled ``Spanish borderlands'' corrected the previous view that those in the wake of Columbus came primarily to plunder and destroy. In this context, Weber demonstrates the multifaceted nature of the Spanish enterprise, beginning with the exploratory period of Ponce de Le¢n, Coronado, De Soto, and the remarkable Cabeza de Vaca in the 1500's. Settlements followed, but these were either military outposts or missions for the conversion of ever-reluctant natives, and the populations in those communities remained small in comparison with those of English communities soon established along the Atlantic seaboard. With royal policy varying from active involvement in maintaining the frontier to periods of severe neglect, and with a pervasive attitude that the Indians were to be subdued and Christianized rather than exploited as trading partners and potential wartime allies—the policy practiced by the French and English—the tensions along Spanish borders remained high. Unable to halt either the erosion of its position as a world power or the steady advance of the Anglo-American colonies, Spain was forced to relinquish its claims, although ample evidence of the Hispanic culture it inspired remains in the Southwest today. An impressive scholarly acknowledgment, full of telling details, of the important Spanish role in North America, useful to ethnohistorians and nonspecialists alike. (Seventy-five illustrations—not seen.)
Pub Date: Oct. 14, 1992
ISBN: 0-300-05198-0
Page Count: 553
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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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