A sturdy, readable survey, aimed more for buffs than for the author’s fellow historians.
Biographically based history of westward expansion by a well-published scholar of that movement.
Hutton, a retired University of New Mexico historian, brackets his narrative of the westward growth of the United States with the once-famed, now out-of-fashion scholar Frederick Jackson Turner, who declared the frontier closed at the end of the 19th century. (It would quickly be reopened with an overseas empire in such western extremes as the Philippines.) Less arguably, Turner held that “the true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West.” From that observation, Hutton proceeds to relate a story that begins even before the founding of the nation, when an unlucky George Washington inadvertently touched off the Seven Years War in North America, “as well as the forty-year conflict between the Americans and the Native tribes for possession of the Ohio Country.” That country was the first west, but it would be followed by many others. One was Texas, whose breakaway from Mexico Hutton relates through the familiar figures of Davy Crockett (“you may all go to Hell and I will go to Texas”), Jim Bowie, and Sam Houston. That “great man” approach is itself old-fashioned, and while Hutton doesn’t uncover much in the way of previously unknown material, he tells a good and vivid story that’s abundantly sympathetic to the Indigenous people who stood in the way of that westward movement, such as the Apache and Comanche Tribes, whose stories are central to Hutton’s. On that score, some of Hutton’s less savory characters include the likes of a former officer who mounted a one-man war against Native peoples, claiming that a pack of wolves followed him “because they’re fond of dead Indians and I feed them well.” It’s not John Wayne’s West, that is to say, but one that lends itself to revisionist accounts.
A sturdy, readable survey, aimed more for buffs than for the author’s fellow historians.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2025
ISBN: 9781524746131
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
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 Yorkerstaff 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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