Reviews tagging 'Genocide'

Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne

5 reviews

clairebartholomew549's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional informative sad tense medium-paced

4.0

This book is brutal, gory, and completely depressing. It chronicles the aggressive settlement of native lands by white people, the political violence the tribes enacted in response and also sua sponte, and the slow vanishing of native culture. It's compulsively readable - Gwynne goes back and forth between decades, smartly telling history through the lens of different actors - and incredibly informative. This is a period of U.S. history that I don't know much about (which is obviously intentional by the education system) and it was all very interesting.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Animal cruelty, Animal death, Child death, Cursing, Death, Genocide, Gore, Gun violence, Miscarriage, Misogyny, Physical abuse, Racism, Rape, Sexism, Sexual assault, Sexual content, Sexual violence, Slavery, Torture, Violence, Blood, Kidnapping, Grief, Suicide attempt, Death of parent, Murder, Pregnancy, Sexual harassment, Colonisation, War, and Injury/Injury detail

Moderate: Cannibalism

Minor: Addiction

jeddicat's review against another edition

Graphic with horrific violence against women.

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Child abuse, Child death, Death, Genocide, Gore, Racial slurs, Racism, Rape, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Torture, Violence, Blood, Murder, Fire/Fire injury, Colonisation, War, Injury/Injury detail, and Classism

pirateenthusiast's review against another edition

1.25

A well researched book. I learned a lot, but this is where the positives end. The language used in this book is repeatedly and horrendously racist. I'm not sure if this was the authors intention or not, but he portrays the Comanches and Native Americans as a whole as "backward stone age hunters". Gwynne claims to be providing an unbiased neutral book that shows both sides in an accurate light. He certainly succeeds in not straying away from the violence of the Comanches with his brutal and graphic descriptions, yet when he describes the violence of the other side, the terms are much more vague, giving the reader the wrong impression. Here is a list of words used in this book and the frequency that they appeared.

Native: 32
Indian(s): 1,177
Savage: 28
Primitive: 19
Redskin: 3
Squaw: 25
Indigenous: 1

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Genocide, Gore, Racism, Torture, Violence, Kidnapping, Colonisation, and War

Moderate: Racial slurs and Rape

Minor: Animal death

siiriainen's review against another edition

dark informative sad medium-paced

1.0

A history of the genocide of America's indigenous people in the West in which the author continuously uses racist and antiquated terms to describe the indigenous groups he's writing about, the most obvious being his chosen term of "indian", but also describing the women as "squaws", calling them prehistoric and savage and so on. 

I'm not against him describing the violence that the Comanche perpetrated in the West against other indigenous groups and white settlers, that is well documented. But to use colonizing and racist language when describing it is pretty gross. Shocked this was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2011. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Genocide, Rape, and Murder

folieassdeux's review against another edition

challenging informative medium-paced

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Child death, Confinement, Death, Genocide, Gun violence, Misogyny, Physical abuse, Racism, Rape, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Torture, Violence, Kidnapping, and Grief