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AMÉRICA

THE EPIC STORY OF SPANISH NORTH AMERICA, 1493-1898

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

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Awards & Accolades

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  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2017


  • New York Times Bestseller


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  • National Book Award Finalist

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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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