Of much literary and historical merit and a fine addition to the shelves of anyone interested in this part of America’s...
Stirring, wide-ranging biography of the Sioux elder whose testimonials underlay “one of the twentieth century’s most important documents on Native American culture.”
Born in the Powder River country in Wyoming, Hehaka Sapa, or Black Elk (1863-1950), was a Lakota Zelig who had been on hand at some of the key moments in the history of the Indian Wars. He was a confidant of Crazy Horse, a leader of the Sun Dance, a warrior at Wounded Knee, and, in between, a performer in Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show—and even, while touring Europe, briefly a suspect in the infamous Jack the Ripper killings. Jackson (Atlantic Fever: Lindbergh, His Competitors, and the Race to Cross the Atlantic, 2012, etc.) surveys a broad swath of world history to place the Lakota spiritual leader in that terribly eventful context, and he does excellent work in doing so, explaining the dynamics of medicine men in Sioux society (there were two classes of them, “war prophets” and “healers”) and the dynamics of an American popular culture that saw John Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks grow from a memoir of modest sales to a kind of Bible of the New Age movement, which “would envelop everything related to Black Elk Speaks in a warm and fuzzy nimbus.” One of the best moments in a book marked by many is Jackson’s in-passing examination of the role of the American media in fueling the Indian Wars; another is his examination of the mystery of Black Elk’s conversion to Catholicism, having long been an advocate of traditional Lakota ways. In the course of his narrative, the author provides a parallel biography of Neihardt, Black Elk’s chronicler, who felt great affection for and attachment to his interlocutor even as various players in Indian country tried to drive a wedge between the two.
Of much literary and historical merit and a fine addition to the shelves of anyone interested in this part of America’s unhappy past.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-374-25330-1
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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