An appealing read for Dragnet fans and anthropology buffs.
Jenkins (English/Univ. of Delaware; The Last Ridge, 2003, etc.) delivers another thrilling tale of death and tragedy in the snow-covered outdoors.
Jenkins specializes in epic feats of adventurous men, including climbers who die in a wintry avalanche and a unit of Army skiers fighting the Nazis. Now he’s taken on the story of Eskimos who, in 1913, murdered two Catholic missionaries and are brought to justice by a brave band of Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The thriller aspect of the story is a pretext for Jenkins’s real effort: a comparison between the worldview of natives living in the harshest terrain on earth and that of the Europeans attempting to impose “civilization” on them. Eskimos knew better than anyone how to live where night reigns for half the year, Jenkins writes. Without them, the Europeans who first explored the Arctic’s thousands of miles of treeless wasteland would have surely perished or, as was common even when they did receive help, gone mad. Jenkins compassionately shows how Eskimos failed to develop a sophisticated religion or code of laws because they were simply too busy fighting to survive. With equal aplomb, he describes the people’s remarkable daily routines: the men constantly hunting to furnish the almost entirely carnivorous diet, and the women sewing constantly to maintain clothing able to withstand the elements. As in most frontier stories, Europeans are good, bad and ugly, the missionaries bumbling, though not necessarily defenseless. White explorers are either shifty or courageous, while the Mounties are uniformly sympathetic, losing their colonizing instincts as they ford icy lakes, hunt caribou and learn to respect the natives’ survival skills. Plot and theme unite in the trial at the conclusion, a sad affair where a blowhard prosecutor addresses a shocked, all-white, all-male Edmonton jury as the two Eskimos—sweating in temperatures they find scorching—fall asleep in their chairs.
An appealing read for Dragnet fans and anthropology buffs.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-50721-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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