A pleasure for thoughtful fans of Old West history, revisionist without being iconoclastic.
A ripsnortin’ ramble across the bloodstained Arizona desert with Wyatt Earp and company.
Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and the like may be best known for the famous shootout at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, but, as trial lawyer and popular historian Boessenecker ably shows, that was but one episode in a drama with many moving parts. Some of it traces back to points east, where ruffians known as “Cowboys”—not at all an admiring term in those days, “synonymous with desperado, bandit, and cutthroat”—robbed and murdered with abandon. The presiding genius of one band was an Irish New Englander who joined the Army and found frontier New Mexico a congenial place to conduct his nefarious business, including cattle rustling, horse thievery, and other affronts to public order. The story of Billy the Kid figures in this history, as does that of Earp paterfamilias Nicholas, hard-drinking, opinionated, and sometimes in trouble with the law. Indeed, at points in this narrative, readers may need a score card to keep track of which side of the law Wyatt and company were on at any given time. By the time they went to war with a Cowboy named Curly Bill Brocius, they were vigilantes who themselves would be in trouble with the authorities, Wyatt having gunned down a quarry on the streets of Tucson without much regard for the niceties of a fair warning. Throughout, Boessenecker displays a fine eye for period detail: He notes that much Old West violence had a political dimension that makes our time look tranquil by comparison. It was made all the nastier by the “entertainment vacuum” that existed on a frontier without much to do except drink and brawl. Charges that the Earps took part in dark-side activities such as gambling “were inflammatory but true,” writes the author, good reason to stay a step ahead of the law and get out of Tombstone after the shooting stopped.
A pleasure for thoughtful fans of Old West history, revisionist without being iconoclastic.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-335-01585-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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