Indian casinos are likely to be around for a long time to come, and Mitchell’s exposé goes a long way toward explaining the...
That casino on the nearby reservation? Think of it as revenge for Christopher Columbus, as some wags have put it—but also a sophisticated operation that makes use of every legal loophole available.
Indian casino gambling began, to give it a charitable spin, as a means of encouraging economic development on reservations. In that, writes federal Indian law expert Mitchell (Sold American: The Story of Alaska Natives and Their Land 1867-1959, 2003, etc.), it works on the principle of “inherent tribal sovereignty,” which allows Indian nations some measure of self-governance and autonomy. In practice, that means that while the local convenience store has to layer on tax after tax on the cigarettes it sells, the drive-up reservation shack does not, which is why lines stretch down the street to buy tax-free cigarettes on Indian land. It’s a complex story, and it gets all the more so when the big players move in. Among them are some shady figures such as a fellow who managed to hold onto a consulting business even while serving prison time. Furthermore, even with that record, he managed to work his way into a position developing bingo parlors for California tribes, parlors that became gateways for slots, blackjack tables, and all the other things that have popped up on reservations even in states where gambling is otherwise illegal. When the Mafia goes to war with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, it’s a pretty easy guess as to who will win—at least the first rounds, anyway. Other players figure in Mitchell’s tangled but highly readable tale, including none other than Donald Trump, who correctly perceived Indian “gaming”—the slightly denatured term for gambling—to be a competitor against his own casinos and tried to have one owned by the Pequot Tribe shut down on the grounds that the Pequot were “fake Indians.” Guess who won that round?
Indian casinos are likely to be around for a long time to come, and Mitchell’s exposé goes a long way toward explaining the whys and hows.Pub Date: June 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4683-0993-5
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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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