The story of the Winslows is an effective way to experience the emotions and fears of the small band who dauntlessly sailed...
Fraser (The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present, 2005, etc.) personalizes the legend of the Pilgrims by focusing on Edward Winslow and family and their voyage from England to Holland to Plymouth.
In the early 1600s, it was no longer peaceful in Holland. Rather than return to England, Charles I sent the Pilgrims to America to get them out of his hair and to create a bulwark against Catholic Spain. Edward was an enthusiastic, impulsive man, a leader who was influenced throughout his life by a series of significant colleagues, William Bradford especially. Arriving on the Mayflower, 41 adult men signed a compact creating the Plymouth Colony, “the first experiment in consensual government in Western history between individuals with one another, and not with a monarch.” Encountering the Massasoit peoples, the pilgrims were initially afraid but then grateful, as the natives saved them in their first desperate winter. The colonists bought furs and gave strength and backing to the smallpox-depleted Wampanoag tribe. Fraser’s smooth storytelling provides a revealing look into the development of the colony, the rise of the Massachusetts Bay Company, and the different outlooks on the community and the lure of land. The Massasoit relied on Edward to act as middleman as other tribes feared trading with whites. As the population grew, the inevitable troublemakers appeared, including Anne Hutchinson and Uncas, the leader of the Mohegan. Edward fought in the Pequot War, a small conflict that eventually cost the Indians’ trust and led to King Philip’s devastating war. Edward also traveled to England as the colony’s representative and eventually served on a number of Cromwell’s commissions. He was truly a founding father, dealing with every aspect of life in the colony, always showing his spirit and how he “liked fighting for a cause.”
The story of the Winslows is an effective way to experience the emotions and fears of the small band who dauntlessly sailed off to the New World.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-10856-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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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