A worthy chronicle. Read between the lines for parallels with events in other insurgent lands.
Add Columbus, N.M., to the roster of attacks on unwitting American civilians.
Americans of 1916 might have wondered why “they” hate us, too. As Welsome (The Plutonium Files, 1999) explains, Pancho Villa, leader of one of the contending armies in revolutionary Mexico, felt betrayed by the Wilson administration’s support of his enemies and was convinced “that the Americans would soon invade their beloved homeland.” He therefore resolved to take his war across the border. The dusty little town of Columbus held a small army garrison, a couple of stores and some needed supplies, so it seemed a promising target. Villa’s attack on it, though, turned out to be a costly tactical mistake, for, among other effects, it drew down a larger American force under the command of John J. Pershing and George Patton, neither of whom had much regard for Mexico’s national sovereignty, and forced Villa to live as an outlaw in his own country. Welsome’s account of the Columbus raid, in which 18 Americans died, is exciting. Her retelling of the Pershing expedition is also solid, a wild-goose-chase nightmare of confused intelligence and inhospitable elements in which Villistas, bandits, the Mexican army, the weather and disease all get a shot at the invading gringo force. Welsome sometimes strives too hard to inject local color into the narrative, and constructions such as “The melancholy cries of tamale women and scissors grinders dropped like birdsong into the somnolent quiet of late afternoons” and “The soldiers sprinted forward, eager to feel the wet mud between their dedos del pie” succeed only in making the reader’s cabeza hurt. Still, the events of 1916 on the border are too little known, as is the season of anti-Mexican reprisal that took place within the U.S. following the raid, culminating in the hanging of six Villistas.
A worthy chronicle. Read between the lines for parallels with events in other insurgent lands.Pub Date: June 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-316-71599-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
HISTORY | MILITARY | UNITED STATES | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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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