White men like to dig in the ground for their food. My people prefer to hunt the buffalo as their fathers did. White men like to stay in one place. My people want to move their tipis here and there to the different hunting grounds….
Davidson, Peter (ed.), George Orwell: Diaries, Liveright Publishing/W.W.Norton, New York, 2012 (597pp.$39.95) One hundred million people died during the various ideological and political catastrophes of the 20th century—wars, famines and holocausts brought on by the tripartite clashing of imperial capitalist colonialism, nationalism, fascism and totalitarian…
We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children. Nothing less will reach the root of the case. Telegram, Sherman to Grant July 1876
Wiencek, Henry. Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2012 (336pp.$28). Having informed the world that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, Thomas Jefferson proceeded to conduct a forty-year…
The more we can kill this year, the less will have to be killed the next war, for the more I see of these Indians the more convinced I am that all have to be killed or maintained as a species of pauper. Their attempts…
Merridale, Catherine. Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2013 (506pp. $35) Once the Slavic Rus tribe emerged as a force in Europe’s northeastern forest, they build a citadel for their warlord, one that would protect the tribe…
Turner, Frederick. Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of ‘Tropic of Cancer’, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2012 (244pp.$24.95) Franz Kafka’s maxim that a book should be an ax to the soul applies in spades to Henry Miller’s masterpiece, “Tropic of Cancer,” published fifty years…
Dalrymple, William. Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan 1839-42, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2013 (515pp.$30) The elephantine, racist and slightly bizarre Western imperial enterprise had some surprising impulses, none more than the one that impelled British troops into Afghanistan (then as now,…
Prochnik, George. The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World, Other Press, New York, 2014 (390pp.$27.95) Relentlessly middlebrow pop-intellectual Stefan Zweig, in the 1920s and 1930s, was the world’s most widely read and broadly translated writer of biographies, novellas and short-stories. For…
Wilson, A.N. The Elizabethans, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2012 (448pp.$30) The queen died unhappy, ravaged by time and illness, her realm disquieted by civil and religious factions that were equally adumbrated by frequent outbreaks of plague. The magistrates and sheriffs were hanging thieves,…