Recommended for any student of American history.
Goodwin (Spain: The Center of the World, 1519-1682, 2015, etc.), a research fellow at University College London, delivers a broad account of Spain’s North American empire and its key players.
The events and people who figure in these pages of centuries-spanning history are mostly well-known, from Cortés and Cabeza de Vaca to the Alamo, but the author’s great strength is to give them layers of meaning that warrant a fresh look. It’s not a standard question in a standard history, for instance, to wonder how Spain gave the conquistadors more or less free rein to act as individual agents while at the same time reining them in to serve the interests of the Spanish Crown. To this end, writes Goodwin, who divides his time between London and Seville, Spain established the office of the Adelantado, which means something like the person who goes ahead against any opposition, an office that “perfectly reflects the individualism that was the foundation of the whole imperial enterprise.” Against this understanding of the “imperial enterprise,” in which a wide array of characters served God and king while seeking to grow rich, individual figures such as De Soto and Coronado stand out, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. The author’s description of the conquistador Pánfilo de Narváez is a case in point: Though Bartolomé de Las Casas depicted him as a murderer, he grudgingly allowed that Narváez had manners, a way with words, and a sparkling intelligence, which makes Goodwin’s account of his demise all the more poignant as, shipwrecked on the coast of Texas, “a north freezing wind blew the pitiful invalid out to sea, never to be heard of again." The author packs a huge amount of information and observation into a relatively small space, though the last couple of dozen pages gallop heedlessly from the Alamo to San Juan Hill; it might have been better to end with Mexican independence, though one hopes that the cursory overview signals a more circumstantial book to come.
Recommended for any student of American history.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63286-722-3
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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