It was hilly and unsuited to cultivation.
Looking for a new home, the Osage found an area of what was to become Oklahoma that no one else wanted. White settlers began squatting on Osage territory, skirmishes ensued and eventually the tribe had to sell the land for $1.25 an acre. This land would be theirs forever, the United States government told them.Īnd then - as David Grann details early in his disturbing and riveting new book, “Killers of the Flower Moon” - this promise, too, was broken. Over the next 20 years, the Osage were stripped of their land, ceding almost 100 million acres, and were forced onto a parcel in southeastern Kansas that measured about 50 by 125 miles (four million acres). Jefferson was impressed, calling them the “finest men we have ever seen.” He promised to treat their tribe fairly, telling them that from then on, “they shall know our nation only as friends and benefactors.” The Osage representatives were tall, many of them over six feet, and they towered over most of their White House hosts. In 1804, President Thomas Jefferson hosted a delegation of Osage chiefs who had traveled from their ancestral land, which Jefferson had recently acquired - from the French, not the Osage - in the Louisiana Purchase. The Osage Murders and the Birth of the F.B.I. It originally appeared in the New York Times Book Review in April 2017. Below is a review of the book, written by author Dave Eggers. On that front, “The Godfather: Part III” fails.David Grann’s true crime tale, “Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI,” is our second pick for the PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club, “Now Read This.” Become a member of the book club by joining our Facebook group, or by signing up to our newsletter.
(Yes, there’s a trend with movies based on video games.)Īnd a good bad movie must not take itself too seriously. If you’re scrolling through channels and the movie is on, would you stop and ironically watch it? If I come across 1993’s “Super Mario Bros.,” I’m hoping to catch the scene of Goombas appearing in an elevator.
The telltale sign of a good bad movie: Do you find yourself laughing at all, and especially when you’re not supposed to? Every gruesome scene from “Street Fighter” is comical to me. “Mortal Kombat: Annihilation”? Even better - poor Johnny Cage! “Star Trek Generations” is one of my favorites of the franchise, even though it nonsensically left Kirk to die under a bridge. The first “Mortal Kombat” movie? Good, even with the campy action scenes. But for a bad movie to be so terrible it’s redeemable, it must have certain characteristics, like unrealistic dialogue and canyon-size plot holes. Here’s the thing: I’ve always loved bad movies. But I went in with a different attitude from critics’: What if the movie was so terrible that it’s actually a great theatrical experience, à la Tommy Wiseau’s “The Room”? And yet, in spite of the terrible reviews, there I was on a rainy Friday in a Manhattan theater with about 20 other people waiting for the movie to start.