A solid, up-to-date, briskly told history of death, resilience, and recovery in the American past.
A consequence of centuries-long imperial rivalries, the 1704 Deerfield Massacre in Massachusetts revealed what could befall settlers of the colonial interior: captivity, terror, and slaughter.
The event, which Swanson, author of Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer, correctly calls “one of the most dramatic episodes in colonial American history,” didn’t greatly alter New England’s settlement. However, it did exemplify the extraordinary risks that pious, land-seeking colonists were willing to take to settle and farm lands claimed not only by Britain, but also by France and Indigenous people always threatened by Europeans’ dispossession. On the snowy Massachusetts frontier that January day, Deerfield lost 63 of its 300 inhabitants to tomahawks, rifles, and arson; 112 others were seized, of whom 89 survived a 300-mile, two-month trek into Quebec. The story’s central figure is the Rev. John Williams, who lost his wife and one child but whose daughter survived to spend her life voluntarily among the Native Americans who’d captured her. Relating the harrowing story, its survivors’ three-year captivity, and the international context in which their release unfolded, Swanson doesn’t add much to what’s long been known. His fresh contributions appear in the chapters on the massacre’s aftermath over the next four centuries. Native raids continued, spurring politicians, orators, and clerics to draw various lessons—many moral, some opportunistic. Townspeople and heirs of the victims erected memorials to the victims, and pageants built around heritage became a tradition. Films were shot, preservation undertaken, nostalgic tears shed for simple ways lost, and, recently, descendants of the Native assailants warmly received. “By 1776,” writes Swanson, “the Deerfield Massacre was a long distant past in a place that the Founders would have found unfamiliar, strange, and even alien to them.”
A solid, up-to-date, briskly told history of death, resilience, and recovery in the American past.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9781501108167
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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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