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. 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. “I no monkey,” he insisted.Ī welcome contribution to the history of Texas, Westward expansion and Native America.Įlie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. Parker remained a leader of his people to the end, writes the author, one who “looked resolutely forward toward something better” rather than surrendering to embitterment or allowing himself to be put on display as a wild Indian now tamed. Gwynne considers Parker alongside Geronimo, the better-known Apache leader, and finds the latter wanting in the comparison. After surrender, Parker continued to insist on preserving Comanche ways, particularly an illegal peyote cult. Army and other heavily armed enemies, who finally broke the Quahadi resistance after removing other Comanche bands to reservations and reducing their number to no more than 2,000.

Parker’s tough leadership eventually proved no match for the combined weight of Texas Rangers, the U.S. When Americans entered the picture in the 1830s and beyond, the Quahadis fought them so hard that by the 1870s whole counties formerly settled by Texas ranchers and farmers were depopulated. The Quahadi band, whom he characterizes as “magnificently aloof,” were the toughest of the lot. As Gwynne notes, the Comanches kept the Spanish empire from spreading onto the plains beyond Texas, making even the Apaches farther west seem a mild threat by comparison. An appropriately fast-paced life of Comanche leader Quanah Parker and his band, the last Native free riders on the plains.įormer Time editor and correspondent Gwynne ( The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI, 1993, etc.) approaches Parker’s life as news, opening with an intriguing gambit-namely, that Parker, who died in 1911, had an Anglo mother who, as he said, “love Indian and wild life so well, no want to go back to white folks.” Where his mixed blood might have been a demerit in other Indian groups-and certainly in white society of the time-Parker rose quickly to the leadership of the Quahadi band of Comanches as a young man of perhaps only 20.

Empire of the summer moon audio book