Though clearly for Old West buffs, this is an enjoyable excursion.
A rip-roaring history of moving the mail in the wildest of the Wild West days.
As fans of Westworld know, it was big money that made the buckboards bounce and the transcontinental railroad chug from coast to coast. One big-money engine was Wells Fargo, the banking concern founded in the gold rush era by two owners of the American Express company in New York who saw in California the possibility of riches in moving wealth—literally—for other people. Thus it is, writes lawyer and former police officer Boessenecker (Texas Ranger: The Epic Life of Frank Hamer, the Man Who Killed Bonnie and Clyde, 2016, etc.), that “In the popular imagination, Wells Fargo is inextricably linked to stagecoaches.” Put a stagecoach or train driver and a shotgun together, stick a cash box onboard, and you’ll get robbers. The formula affords the author the opportunity to parade a catalog of good guys and bad guys across the story. Early on comes the admirable Wells Fargo pioneering rider Chips Hodgkins, who ran away from home, became an apprentice to a shipwright, and then moved to California to carry millions of dollars in gold over the course of a four-decade career. “He was so scrupulously honest,” writes Boessenecker, “that is was commonly said of him, ‘No man in the United States ever actually handled more money than he did, but not a nickel of it ever stuck to his fingers.’" Not so the likes of the desperado named “Rattle Jack,” who, shot to pieces in a robbery attempt, begged his fellow outlaws to kill him. They obliged, “and after tying a rope to his neck to make it look like he had been lynched, they tossed his body into the Russian River.” Also figuring in these pages are Wells Fargo lawmen like Jeff Milton, tough railroaders like Aaron Ross, and unsung bad guys like Ormus B. Nay. It’s a readable if old-fashioned exercise in criminal yarn spinning.
Though clearly for Old West buffs, this is an enjoyable excursion.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-18488-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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