The Last Campaign

June 1, 2022

Award-winning Danish author/critic Andersen tells The LEGO Story, plumbing company archives and interviewing third-generation Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen to discover how his family turned those cute interlocking plastic rectangles into international toy stars (75,000-copy first printing). With The Last Campaign, Pulitzer Prize finalist Brands chronicles the battle between Apache leader, warrior, and medicine man Geronimo and U.S. general William Tecumseh Sherman that would determine the shape of the United States and the fate of Indigenous peoples beyond the Mississippi River. The New York Times best-selling Brinkley chronicles the Silent Spring Revolution of the Sixties, when environmental activists pushed first for legislation aimed at protecting the wilderness, then expanded to fighting the pollutants despoiling Earth and risking public health (200,000-copy first printing). Pulitzer Prize finalist Conover (Newjack) takes us to Cheap Land Colorado, chronicling an off-the-grid community in San Luis Valley where he lived on and off for four years so that he could get close to people who traded security for freedom or had nothing left to lose. A senior writer at the Wall Street Journal, Hilsenrath tracks the career of U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen (35,000-copy first printing). Soros Fellow and chair of the Freelance Taskforce for the National Association of Black Journalists, Hubbard argues that hip-hop ignores or demeans Black women in Ride-or-Die (30,000-copy first printing). In Number One Is Walking, Martin recaps his remarkable acting career in a graphic memoir featuring the artwork of New Yorker cartoonist Harry Bliss (300,000-copy first printing). With The World Record Book of Racist Stories, comedian Ruffin and big sister Lamar join forces to repeat the success of their New York Times best-selling You'll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey, detailing the absurdist aspects of everyday racism (75,000-copy first printing). In Control, geneticist Rutherford (A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived) revisits the rise of eugenics from its origins in Victorian England to its awful apotheosis in Nazi Germany and its ongoing legacy today. What's the impact on our psyches of knowing that the universe originated 14 billion years ago and is still expanding? Ask Swimme, author of Cosmogenesis and host and cocreator of PBS's Journey of the Universe. Wrongly accused of drug dealing in New Jersey and sentenced to a life behind bars, Wright (Marked for Life) studied law in the prison library, helped overturn the convictions of numerous fellow inmates, then won his own release and now practices law in the same courtroom where he was convicted (125,000-copy first printing).

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September 5, 2022
Historian Brands (Our First Civil War) takes a fine-grained yet somewhat lopsided look at the final military battles fought between the U.S. government and the Apache, Lakota, Nez Perce, and other Native American tribes. Covering the period between the first forced marches along the Trail of Tears in the 1830s and the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre, the narrative documents decades of relentless government pressure to push Native Americans away from valuable land, brutal relocation campaigns, tense negotiations, internal debates among tribal leaders about whether to resist or capitulate, and key battles. Brands incorporates Indigenous perspectives, including She Walks With Her Shawl’s eyewitness account of the Battle of Little Big Horn, but most of the narrative is spent with U.S. Army general William Sherman and other military leaders, including Philip Sheridan and Nelson Miles. Though Brands quotes from Sherman’s letters and journal entries calling for peace, he’s more interested in delivering battlefield play-by-plays than interrogating the racist attitudes of the day or conveying the full range of the Native American experience. Though well written and often engrossing, this history is missing some crucial context.

October 15, 2022
While conflicts among colonists and Indigenous peoples surged and ebbed from the beginning of European settlers' arrival in the long-inhabited New World, Brands (Dreams of El Dorado, 2019) here focuses on the stage of westward expansion following the Civil War and the advent of transcontinental railroads. Pressure from ever-growing settlements of white American ranchers and farmers threatened complete annihilation of Native Americans. Civil War hero William Tecumseh Sherman had basic sympathy for the Native Americans whose resistance to sequestration in reservations he was sent to quell. Having razed much of Georgia in his triumphant march to the sea, he feared the lethally destructive effects of modern warfare. In the Southwest, charismatic Apache leader Geronimo used strategies he had honed fighting Mexican interlopers to battle the white settlers flooding into the Arizona territory. Drawing on their mastery of local geography, his band of warriors held out, riding out from their reservations sporadically, until they were compelled to capitulate. Brands describes the horrors of these clashes in vivid prose, drawing on conversations and memoirs from the era to document the tragedy.

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Starred review from September 1, 2022
A sweeping history of the Indian Wars and two iconic fighters. The Geronimo campaign has been so intensely studied for the last 150 years that it's hard to imagine there's much new information to discover. Noted historian Brands finds news, though, by placing the war against the Apaches in the larger context of the Indian Wars generally, from the mass hanging of Sioux rebels in 1862 to the Modoc Wars, Little Bighorn, the Red Cloud War, and more. A central figure in those campaigns was William Tecumseh Sherman, who, ironically, bore the name of an early champion of Native American resistance. Stationed in Florida during the time of the Indian removals from the East, he opined that "Florida...was of little value to us" and suggested that Native tribes should be moved there and not what he considered the more valuable lands of Oklahoma. Transferred to the West after heroic service in the Civil War, he told a militant White audience bent on annihilating neighboring tribes, "I don't see how we can make a decent excuse for an Indian war." Yet, when the occasion demanded, Sherman could be as ruthless as he was in Georgia, noting that the foremost goal of war was not extermination--a word he used sometimes inadvisedly--but instead economic disaster. Reflecting Sherman's thinking, Gen. Philip Sheridan wrote, "reduction to poverty brings prayers for peace more surely and more quickly than does the destruction of human life, as the selfishness of man has demonstrated in more than one great conflict." The application of that technique brought mixed results, and Geronimo held out to the end. Brands is particularly good in placing all this in a political as well as military context, with Sherman wrestling with Indian Agency bureaucrats in Washington over whether they or the Army should oversee matters of war, peace, and, in the end, cultural extermination. An excellent, well-written study--like most of the author's books, a welcome addition to the literature of westward expansion.

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