Students of Southwestern and Spanish colonial history will want to have a look, if only to argue. General readers will find...
Speculative life of the African slave who traveled with Cabeza de Vaca across the unknown deserts of Texas and Mexico.
The known facts about Esteban—Estevanico or Estebanico, in much of the literature—are few. That does not keep British scholar Goodwin from insisting that he was “almost certainly Negroid and of sub-Saharan ancestry,” even though Esteban’s contemporaries referred to him as el Moro, “the Moor,” or morisco, “Moorish,” which could have meant that he was a Berber, Moor or Taureg, if not black. Goodwin soon allows that the interpretations are many, but asserts that it could “be racist to make [any ethnic] distinction.” Against common usage, too, he insists that Esteban should be considered African-American because…well, he was an African in America. Objections aside, Esteban lived an indisputably adventurous if star-crossed life; he was shipwrecked with Cabeza de Vaca and some 300 other Spaniards off the coast of Texas and was one of four to survive an overland crossing to Mexico. Goodwin inclines to the hagiographic on that near-miraculous survival, by virtue of which Esteban “was now a revered shaman.” Though the author faults Cabeza de Vaca (“[his] own account in Shipwrecks is hardly convincing”), who told the shaman tale in the first place, he is comfortable in assigning a fairly specific geography and chronology to events and places over which generations of scholars have argued. Goodwin also offers a conspiracy-tinged hint of Esteban’s end, though he makes the good point that it arrived after Esteban had decided to release himself from slavery on his own authority.
Students of Southwestern and Spanish colonial history will want to have a look, if only to argue. General readers will find more firmly grounded accounts in Paul Schneider’s Brutal Journey (2006) and Andrés Reséndez’s A Land So Strange (2007).Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-114044-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
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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