A well-written, welcome work of history and advocacy.
A stampeding, crusading history of horses in America during the last half-millennium.
Wild horses are a problem for range-management types and government officials, especially in places where there seem to be as many horses as humans—Wyoming, South Dakota and, notably, Nevada. Thus it is that those mustangs are rounded up and, from time to time, slaughtered, a practice that Stillman (Twentynine Palms: A True Story of Murder, Marines, and the Mojave, 2001) rightly condemns. Her book offers a spirited defense of the wild horse, as well as a rousing, sweeping account of the horse from the arrival of the conquistadors, who would not have been able to subdue North America without it, even as the unconquered peoples of the plains learned how to tame horses, in nature “animals of prey . . . [that] like the wide open.” More than half of the Spanish mesteños, Stillman notes, died on the crossing from Europe; enough of them survived, though, to give Hernán Cortés and his fellow soldiers the aspect of gods, or so the Aztecs thought. Lacking some of their old natural enemies, the horses multiplied and took up life in the wild. Stillman writes that in colonial Los Angeles so many of them came to the edge of town, browsed the forage and “spirited the gentled horses away” that drovers were forced to take after them with lances and herd them over cliffs into the ocean. The author relates the careers of famed horses such as Comanche, hailed as the lone survivor of the Battle of Little Bighorn, and Fritz, without whom “Hollywood would have stalled at Bronco Billy, the cowboy who couldn’t ride and didn’t even have his own horse.” Stillman sometimes inclines into the mystical, but horses are, after all, inspiring creatures, so she is to be forgiven the occasional reverie—though her celebratory mood darkens, understandably, as she approaches modern times and the tenderfoot bureaucrats who govern them.
A well-written, welcome work of history and advocacy.Pub Date: June 9, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-618-45445-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2008
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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