A worthy companion to Jay Monahan’s Custer, Evan S. Connell’s Son of the Morning Star and other standard studies of the...
Comprehensive account of George Custer’s career.
Dallas-based literary agent Donovan does much kind service to Custer, who has long been without champions. We think of Custer as vainglorious and foolhardy, thanks in great measure to Arthur Penn’s 1970 film Little Big Man; only a vain man would have dressed like a longhaired gypsy dandy and gone galloping off to fight every Indian in the West, right? Donovan finds the upside: Custer dressed colorfully and wore his hair long in the interest of conspicuousness, reasoning that “if his men saw their commanding officer share the danger, they would fight even harder.” He always made a point to be at the head of the action, golden locks and bright red scarf gleaming. There was a reason that Custer was the youngest general in the Union Army. At places such as Gettysburg, he distinguished himself by brave action against heavy odds, and his Michigan horsemen “quickly earned a reputation as the best brigade in the cavalry corps.” Yet something seems to have happened to Custer out West. He shared the general disdain of the white soldiers for their Indian opponents, hubris that cost a young captain named William Fetterman and his men their lives and set in motion the events that would culminate in Little Bighorn—and later, Wounded Knee. But Donovan is no agenda-laden, blind defender of Custer; he carefully notes the results of the inquiry that followed the famed slaughter, when Custer’s commanding general damned him for “negligence and outright insubordination.” His thoroughgoing account lends considerable humanity to all involved, from the Hunkpapa warrior Rain-in-the-Face to the ordinary privates who died with Custer on that hot June day in Montana.
A worthy companion to Jay Monahan’s Custer, Evan S. Connell’s Son of the Morning Star and other standard studies of the famed cavalryman.Pub Date: March 24, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-316-15578-6
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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