I found the writing a bit dense/dry for the first two thirds, and when I was engaged I often felt voyeuristic. I think it would have been different if the book had been written by an Osage person, or at least told in the style of the final 1/4 of the book where he heavily features dialogue with people he visited in the Osage nation. 

Oh geez. Shocking, not that these evil has existed, but the depths of the evil. Grann tells the story with no holds barred. I appreciate his detail and storytelling and clear care and sorrow for the Osage people. The Reign of Terror is an important piece of American history, and I would recommend this to anyone curious about understanding what the Osage have been put through. If you struggle with non-fiction this also doesn’t have that textbook-y read to it, without watering down the info. 

Truly one of the best books I’ve ever read. Chronicles the grotesque history of abuse and extortion of the indigenous in the americas as a legacy that continues today. The author approaches the nonfiction tale as a narrative beyond reality by how shocking and inane the story of the Osage truly is.

I wished I had read this before I saw the film opening weekend.

Being Native and being in Indigenous spaces, this case was familiar to me, though I didn't know the full story.

While I, like many others, would have liked an Osage to tell this story, I do not have an much of a problem with Grann telling the stories. Because Grann is a journalist and stuck to the facts and acknowledged not only in the acknowledgments who he was getting these stories from throughout the book. It is refreshing to hear someone not from our community accurately portray the prejudices Natives face in the court system. He asked "would any white man at the time convict another white man for killing an Indian?" 

I highly recommend, especially if you are Indigenous and had to walk out of the movie due to the gore.

A non-fiction book that moves with the urgency of a murder-mystery, this account of a forgotten injustice will boil your blood, especially since the crimes were saturated with racism against the Osage First Nations. 

This is a hard review to write. Not because I didn't like the book, because I did. I really, really liked it. I had been looking forward to reading this, and in when it was returned to the library, and there were no holds on it, I jumped at the chance.

David Grann has done a magnificent job of chronicling a series of crimes that I had never heard about. This was not something I ever heard about in any history classes (or at least I don't remember it). Mr. Grann compiled hours and hours of research, much of which required him to travel and find people, interviewing them to find what they remembered.

In the early twentieth century, crimes were perpetrated against the Osage Native Americans, all to steal the rights to the oil under their land. In the late nineteenth century, the Osage were forced to leave their lands in Kansas and were relegated (as was done to so many Native Americans) to a small plot of land in Oklahoma. Ironically, that land turned out to have the richest oil reserve in the country underneath it, and the government had to pay the Osage for it, which made the Osage some of the wealthiest people in the country. White men couldn't stand that, so they (one, in particular) set out to finagle a way to steal that money from them. 

David Grann has written an excellent narrative about these crimes. It is a jarring story, which, at times, caused me to be ashamed to be a white man. The bigotry and rampant greed, with not even a hint of morality, is disgusting and shocking. But I guess when you don't consider a race of people to even be people, morals aren't required.

Grann even helped to solve a couple of the crimes that had remained unsolved, through the years, through his relentless research. It was, of course, too late to bring any justice, as the people involved were long dead, but it provided some answers to lingering questions.

Through this narrative, we also get a glimpse of the beginnings of the FBI, under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover. I found that to be fascinating as well. The Feds had to be brought in because the local and state governments were just as involved in the corruption as the individuals who were committing the crimes.

I now plan to watch the movie that came out last year, to see how it compares.