Although the thrill here is in the discovery of South Pass, the weight of the story is in its political and economic...
Set amid a homey and observant history of early trading in the Pacific Northwest, McCartney (Friends in High Places, 1988) tells the story of the trek that opened the wagon route west.
In 1812, a young fur trader, Robert Stuart, working for John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company, set off eastward from Astoria, with six companions, to find a suitable route across the continent for traders. Working from letters and the journal Stuart kept (when the ink ran out, he used berry juice and his own blood), McCartney—a descendent of Stuart—tells of tribulations ranging from fleas, bloodsuckers, and rattlesnakes, to mental illness, horse theft, hunger, and despair. Yet McCartney tells the story with command, never getting breathless. He manages to bring the native populations into focus as distinct entities—Chinooks, Clatsops, Brules, Mandans, Absarokas, Wishrams, Wahkiacums, Echeloots, Tetons, Yankstons, and many more. He makes sense, too, out of the rivalries among Russians, British, French, Canadians, and Americans. He paints the landscape broadly, for Stuart had an interest in nature and culture as well as in trade and exploration. McCartney discusses Astor’s political gamesmanship as he secured Astoria and then tried to circumvent the embargo of the War of 1812. He details the even more arduous voyage of Wilson Price Hunt, who had followed the Lewis and Clark route four years later. And he relates the expedition’s truly golden discovery (it wasn’t beaver pelts) with cool understatement: South Pass, located by Stuart on a tip from the Shoshone, was an Old Crow trail through the Rockies and the only one traversable by wagon: “Though they were preoccupied at the time of the crossing with immediate life-and-death concerns—finding firewood, food and water and retaining their scalps—the returning Astorians clearly understood the significance of what they’d discovered.”
Although the thrill here is in the discovery of South Pass, the weight of the story is in its political and economic setting. McCartney handles both with aplomb. (Illustrations)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-4924-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
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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