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REVOLVER

SAM COLT AND THE SIX-SHOOTER THAT CHANGED AMERICA

A solid blend of technological, economic, social, and popular history.

Vigorous life of Samuel Colt (1814-1862), the renowned and controversial inventor of the pistol that bears his name today.

Colt was a young teenager when he shipped out to sea, where he had one of those lightbulb moments—or would have, if there had been lightbulbs in 1831. He probably owed it to something he’d seen in a market in India, but there it was: a model he’d carved of a pistol that, unlike the single-load models of the day, had a “fist-shaped bulge above the trigger” inside of which could be found the solution to a nagging technological problem: how to fire several bullets without reloading. With Colt’s invention, by popular historian and journalist Rasenberger’s account, two great forces met, one economic and the other demographic. Here was an invention more important than the mechanical reaper or cotton gin, one that, with all its murderous possibilities, gave specific force to Manifest Destiny and the conquest of the continent. Colt seems to have had some inkling of all this since he fought relentlessly to preserve his patents, including using a pioneering campaign of lobbying “where congressmen were wined and dined and flirted with by attractive women who, sooner or later, whispered into their ears about the benefits of Colt’s patent extension.” Himself a carouser of indifferent morals, Colt made and lost a fortune or two over the years. He died near the beginning of the Civil War, in which his “revolver was a sideshow…a desirable but inessential accoutrement carried by officers and cavalry”—but especially by guerrillas such as Quantrill’s Raiders and the gang of the Confederate bushwhacker Bloody Bill Anderson, who used Colt’s invention to slaughter Union troops equipped with single-shot muskets. As Rasenberger notes in conclusion, knowing all this about Colt won’t change anyone’s mind about guns, but his useful study certainly lends depth to the ongoing debate about them.

A solid blend of technological, economic, social, and popular history.

Pub Date: May 26, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-5011-6638-9

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2017


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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

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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

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