"Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History," by S.C. Gwynne (Simon & Schuster, 384 pp.)
This vivid narrative intertwines the history of the rise and fall of the Comanches with the story of Quanah Parker, the mixed-blood warrior who became the last and greatest chief of the Comanches. Monitor reviewer David Holahan calls this story "a blow-by-blow account of the hardscrabble and bloody life on the Texas frontier in the middle decades of the 19th century" and concludes that "the adjective 'astonishing' doesn’t do such stories justice." (See the full CSMonitor review here.)
