Armchair travelers will enjoy Dodson’s wanderings—and may even be inspired to explore the road on their own.
An amiable amble along Appalachian-fronting blue highways.
“The Great Wagon Road is probably the least known historic road in America,” writes Dodson, better known for books on golf than on the nation’s past. Yet, as he writes in this pleasingly informal travelogue, he comes by his passion for the GWR naturally, having been inducted by a scholarly father in the pleasures of visiting historical places. An aficionado of Revolutionary War history, Dodson hits on plenty of battles along his path, which stretches from Pennsylvania and down the Shenandoah Valley into the Carolinas and Georgia. Like so many historic roads, the GWR began as a Native trail, but it soon came to serve as a conduit for moving new waves of immigrants out of crowded cities like Philadelphia into unsettled places. On that score, Dodson serves up an apposite quote from Benjamin Franklin, who, in an intemperate moment, railed, “Why should Pennsylvania, funded by the English, become a colony of aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us, instead of us Anglifying them?” Many of Dodson’s historical subjects are those Germans, many others Scots-Irish, while his modern interlocutors come from all over, with one generous-minded local historian remarking, “The good news…is that many of the migrants we see coming here from Central and South America are hardworking folks eager to make a living.” Dodson touches on other current controversies, including efforts to remove Confederate statues from Southern historical sites and, of more specialist interest, the exact routes of the GWR’s numerous spurs. He writes with a light hand, talking with everyone who comes across his path and capturing some apt ideas, including one observation that in the colonial American melting pot, “the English built the houses, the Germans built the barns, and the Scots-Irish built the stills.”
Armchair travelers will enjoy Dodson’s wanderings—and may even be inspired to explore the road on their own.Pub Date: July 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781476746746
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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 Yorkerstaff 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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