Well and self-effacingly written and a pleasure for armchair travelers and Old West buffs.
Genial exploration of the breakneck-ride world of the Wild West’s postal carriers.
“I got two questions for you. One, how crazy does a guy have to be to ride a horse from Missouri to California? And two, how sore is your ass right about now?” So asked a Nevada rancher of Grant, well into his 100-day, cross-country travels. The questions were apposite. Over the course of his entertaining narrative, the author has occasion to think about at least the first at some leisure. Whereas the original Pony Express, which ran for less than two years, took 10 days to make the distance from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California, Grant increased the time tenfold. As Grant points out, the original riders didn’t have to face the dangers of “civilization and its infrastructure,” as represented by the mile-wide, multilane bridge over the Missouri River just outside St. Joseph and the mad traffic of places such as Salt Lake City. The author shows that sometimes, it does help to ask, for he had assumed that the good people of the city would be in church on Sunday morning, when he hoped to guide his two geldings, named Chicken Fry and Badger, out of town. Not a chance, said one friendly fellow: “We call that the Mormon 500…and there’s always traffic.” Aware of the vagaries of Sierra Nevada snowfall, too, the interlocutor tells Grant he’d best pick up the pace: “Might be time to find another gear, partner.” Amazingly, knowing little but with a wellspring of friendly intention and a lively curiosity about the places he saw and people he met, Grant survived it all. Call it a Travels With Charley with two beat-up but utterly dependable mounts instead of a poodle, and you’ve got an idea of what this good-natured narrative is all about. It will also appeal to fans of Rinker Buck.
Well and self-effacingly written and a pleasure for armchair travelers and Old West buffs.Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 9780316422314
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
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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