book review short nights of the shadow catcher

Curtis spent the next three decades documenting the stories and rituals of more than eighty North American tribes. But when he was thirty-two years old, in 1900, he gave it all up to pursue his Great Idea: to capture on film the continent’s original inhabitants before the old ways disappeared. He moved in rarefied circles, a friend to presidents, vaudeville stars, leading thinkers. Egan’s spirited biography might just bring the recognition that eluded him in life.” - Washington Post Edward Curtis was charismatic, handsome, a passionate mountaineer, and a famous portrait photographer, the Annie Leibovitz of his time. Bravo.“A vivid exploration of one man's lifelong obsession with an idea. The influence they wielded over states and policy should put a chill in every American. The Klan here are not the nightriders of the late 19th century, but a retooled special interest group and unusually potent political power. “Egan has done it again, mastering another complicated American story with authority and surprising detail. It is also terrifyingly relevant.” - Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction “Timothy Egan’s history of the Ku Klux Klan’s rise and fall is absolutely gripping. His account of photographer Edward Curtis, Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher, won the Carnegie Medal for nonfiction.

His book, The Worst Hard Time, won a National Book Award for Excellence in Nonfiction. Timothy Egan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and the author of nine other books, most recently the highly acclaimed A Pilgrimage to Eternity and The Immortal Irishman, a New York Times bestseller. But at the peak of his influence, it was a seemingly powerless woman-Madge Oberholtzer-who would reveal his secret cruelties, and whose deathbed testimony finally brought the Klan to their knees.Ī Fever in the Heartland marries a propulsive drama to a powerful and page-turning reckoning with one of the darkest threads in American history. Within two years of his arrival in Indiana, he’d become the Grand Dragon of the state and the architect of the strategy that brought the group out of the shadows-judges, prosecutors, ministers, governors, and senators across the country all proudly proclaimed their membership. Stephenson was a magnetic presence whose life story changed with every telling. And the man who set in motion their takeover of great swaths of America was a charismatic charlatan named D.C. They hated Blacks, Jews, Catholics, and immigrants in equal measure, and took radical steps to keep these people from the American promise. Their domain was not the old Confederacy, but the Heartland and the West.

But it was also the height of the uniquely American hate group, the Ku Klux Klan. The Roaring Twenties has been characterized as a time of Gatsby frivolity.

Book review short nights of the shadow catcher