A sturdy tale of Native-White relations in Colonial America that have echoes in Native legal struggles today.
A seemingly open-and-shut murder trial opens onto complex class and ethnic relations in the early Colonial era.
In 1638, in the Plymouth Colony, a Nipmuc trader was robbed and stabbed by a gang of colonists. Before he died, he was able to tell the Colony’s governor, Roger Williams, enough about the attack that authorities were able to arrest the culprits. That arrest and the subsequent legal proceedings, writes former attorney Pearl, are significant inasmuch as they represent “the Plymouth Colony’s first significant murder trial.” The trial placed several contending forces in motion, set against the background of a war involving colonists and Native people—and, to complicate matters, Native people who fought among themselves, with the trader likely one who “fought with his Narragansett allies in the Pequot War on the side of [the] colonists.” That he spoke English and was an intermediary did not spare him from the assault perpetrated by a former soldier named Arthur Peach, who had camped with three other outlaws in the territory between the Wampanoag and Narragansett peoples in the hope of evading both, having fled from a servitude contract with a prominent colonist. In the end, the trial involved a cast of characters straight out of the history textbooks, from Williams to Myles Standish and the sachem Massasoit, who tried to intervene on Peach’s behalf even as the jury also seemed inclined to take the renegade’s side in the matter. Pearl sometimes overwrites (“His elders passed down countless stories involving brave sojourners unexpectedly tested by angered gods, tricksters, mischief makers, or monsters—and the man coming toward him, Arthur Peach, was a monster”), but her narrative makes a solid bookend to Jill Lepore’s The Name of War in limning the complex relationships at work in a fraught place and time.
A sturdy tale of Native-White relations in Colonial America that have echoes in Native legal struggles today.Pub Date: March 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-101-87171-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
