There are many good histories of Colonial America. This isn’t one of them.
A history of American colonialism, broadly defined.
The history of Colonial America used to be much shorter; it started with the Mayflower and ended with the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Freedom and progress were the main themes of the narrative, and the lesson was clear: the values of that time produced a successful nation. That approach has long since been scraped as overly simplistic, and since the 1960s, historians have attempted to address the various paradoxes of American history, the stories of the unfree (or less-free)—in particular blacks, Indians, and women. Pulitzer-winner Taylor (History/Univ. of California, Davis; William Cooper’s Town, 1999, etc.) sets out to construct a truer history by righting the wrongs of exclusion. Indians arrived in the continent over 12,000 years ago, so their story is given greater length. Spanish explorers occupied the Americas 100 years before any other group of Europeans, so their story is included in greater detail as well. The French and Russians tried to colonize parts of America, might as well throw them in. And the British get a broader look, too, since independence from England did not mean that the Indians waved the white flag. Lest the story be too limited in scope, Taylor uses a variety of historical tools to investigate the centuries of evidence, “an Atlantic perspective, environmental history, and the history of colonial and native peoples.” A noble intention that renders this a laundry-list of facts and theories that fail to form a whole. Worse, there’s nothing new here: Historians since Edmund Morgan have examined the implications of the cultural mix in the New World, and the environmental history (which Taylor seems most interested by, but least dedicated to) reads like an homage to Jared Diamond.
There are many good histories of Colonial America. This isn’t one of them.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-87282-2
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
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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