Stone defines this as "the story of the opening of a land and the building of a civilization" — and this is the sweeping effect of his saga of the opening of the Far West, specifically California, Nevada, Utah and Colorado. Indians and trappers and hunters and a handful of settlers on the Coast made little impress on the empire belonging to Mexico, in 1840. And the man who opened the sluicegates was a man who had failed at everything else, "Captain" John Augustus Sutter. Ambition and imagination and determination launched the beginnings of his small empire in the valley of the Sacramento. Gold rounded out the story, as it was to round out other approaches to the opening of the West. Irving Stone tells all of the history in terms of the men — sometimes the women- who opened the land and built that civilization. It is almost overwhelming in the mass of material he has used, sometimes with a lack of selectivity that makes balance difficult for the reader, but always with the gift of the storyteller, the sense of drama, the appreciation of shifting values. Gold — silver — railroads- these proved the spurs; floods of immigrants followed various trails; communities mushroomed; violence and lawlessness gave way before self-constituted law of vigilantes; government took shape slowly; Washington granted statehood in desperation — or withheld it (as in the case of Utah) in order to win a dispute. Polygamy was the moot question, and for a generation and more harried the Mormons and brought virtual civil war. The War between the States had its repercussions. Fortunes were made- and lost. Major figures rose to peaks — and fell. The stories for each area overlapped- had their likenesses and their differences. It's a mammoth task, accomplished with zest and a keen sense of capturing history. Some of the versions he has accepted (the Donner Party tragedy, the Mountain Meadows Massacre, for example) will rouse heated controversy. But for the most part, this serves a purpose a kin to Bernard De Voto's recording of the days of the Conquistadores. In this addition to Mainstream of America, the storyteller outweighs the historian.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1956
ISBN: 042510544X
Page Count: 562
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1956
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
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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