(Scribner, 371 pages, $27.50)
If there was one native tribe that might have arrested America’s westward expansion, it was the fearsome Comanche, said Bruce Barcott in The New York Times. In S.C. Gwynne’s gripping new history of the Comanche nation and its greatest leader, the 19th-century West feels like a place we’ve never seen clearly before. The Comanches “were a Native American superpower.” With their unparalleled skills as horsemen and ruthless use of nighttime raids on potential rivals, they ruled a great buffalo-hunting ground that encompassed most of modern-day Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma. When white settlers encroached, the Comanches slaughtered the men and infants, and often captured the women. Gwynne makes scenes like these so palpable that his book may “leave blood and dust on your jeans.”
An “extraordinary” main character gives the book its spine, said David Holahan in The Christian Science Monitor. Quanah Parker, born in the late 1840s, was the son of a Comanche chief and a white woman who had been captured as a young girl. A skilled raider, he led a band of Comanche warriors that killed hundreds of white settlers and was instrumental in briefly rolling back the white frontier some 200 miles. But Parker rose to power just as the development of railroads and repeating firearms turned the battle in the settlers’ favor. He eventually agreed to move his people to a reservation, and in a “bravura second act” became a cattle rancher, school board chairman, and pal of President Teddy Roosevelt. “The adjective ‘astonishing’ doesn’t do such stories justice.”
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Gwynne recounts this history evenhandedly, highlighting several important but often overlooked factors, said Bill Mashburn in the Roanoke, Va., Times. The Comanches, he points out, were originally transformed into a major war power by horses brought to the New World by 17th-century conquistadors. White expansion, meanwhile, only became unstoppable after the railroad created an efficient way to ship buffalo hide to Eastern markets. Gwynne is also candid about the brutality of both the Comanche raids and the U.S. Army’s retaliation. This is history that thrills even as it reshapes our understanding of the past. “You may never think about Texas, or the Great Plains, in quite the same way again.”
-
The mission to demine UkraineThe Explainer An estimated quarter of the nation – an area the size of England – is contaminated with landmines and unexploded shells from the war
-
Can anyone save Jimmy Lai?Today's Big Question 'Britain's shameful inaction' will mean it's partly 'responsible' if Hong Kong businessman dies in prison
-
The most notable records broken by Taylor SwiftIn Depth The pop star has cemented herself as one of the century's most popular artists
-
Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
-
Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
-
The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
-
Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
-
Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
-
Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
-
You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
-
Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”