Of a piece with Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven (2003), though without its drama—serviceable, but really a...
Roberts (Sandstone Spine: Seeking the Anasazi on the First Traverse of the Comb Ridge, 2005, etc.) elaborates on a footnote to the history of westward expansion, excoriating the early leaders of Mormonism in the bargain.
Those leaders already have much to answer for, as Fawn Brodie’s No Man Knows My History (1945) and Sally Denton’s American Massacre (2003) demonstrate. Roberts adds to the charges with this study of the handcart migration of 1856, an experiment that ended in tragedy. It involved mostly European immigrants recruited abroad for settlement in “Deseret,” the great Mormon territory twice the size of Texas, which speaks, in Roberts’s formulation, to “the grandiosity of Mormon ambitions.” Lacking the Conestoga wagons of earlier immigrants, which Mormon leader Brigham Young said the church could not afford, they had to traverse the 1,300 miles from Iowa to Utah, across prairies and mountains, using two-wheeled carts. As Roberts recounts, about 3,000 immigrants made the trek, the last contingents of them, numbering about 1,000, leaving late in the summer. Caught in early snowstorms in the Wyoming Rockies and worn down by the journey, some 220 died. By Roberts’s account, Young had received warning that the late-leaving parties were courting disaster, and, he writes, “The Prophet seems to have forgotten that in 1847 it had taken his hand-picked pioneer party, nearly all of whom were men in the prime of life, 108 days to travel from Winter Quarters [Nebraska] to the Great Salt Lake, over a trail three hundred miles shorter than the one the handcart pioneers would be required to traverse.” Following the deaths, others within the Mormon hierarchy were scapegoated. Roberts’s account is solid, but he oversimplifies in order to blame Young. Other historians, such as Leonard Arrington and Bernard DeVoto, have shown that there were many causes at work, including poor communications and the newly converted immigrants’ zeal to get to the promised land.
Of a piece with Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven (2003), though without its drama—serviceable, but really a magazine article plumped up to book length.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-3988-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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
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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