Whipping Boy CL

by Speer Morgan

In a tale as plainspoken as a country conversation and as relentless as a prairie wind, Morgan tells of a young man's search for wholeness in a time when the violence of the American frontier was... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0395677254
• ISBN13: 9780395677254
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 326 Pages
• Weight: 1.38 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.3" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

First Rate

The careful reader of the Whipping Boy will note that Morgan accepts few of the stereotypes of the southwestern frontier. For example, Hanging Judge Parker has become a symbol to liberals of the mindlessly violent injustice of frontier justice, especially as by the 1880s Federal officials began working to undermine Parker's authority;Morgan reveals that Federal officials chiefly opposed Parker because he strictly enfoced the law to protect the Indians in what is now Oklahoma from both marauding criminal whites and from the Federal government itself that coveted their land and eventually would strip the Nations of their final sovereignty. The novel's time period is 1894, after the great land rush and when a combination of Federal officials and northeastern businessmen with experience in coal and oil began furtively plotting to destroy the Nations and create a larger Oklahoma ruled for and by the interests of those businessmen and their government allies, using white farmers as pawns to weaken the Indian Nations and to convince the American populace this was for the good of the USA as a whole - the same argument that propped the removal of the 5 Tribes from the southeast to what would be eastern Oklahoma.Morgan didn't need the graphic sex scenes, and his presentation of the Presbyterian pastor who runs the orphanage for Indian boys is the one stock character living up to stereotypes. But The Whipping Boy is a better novel, in some ways vastly so, than the recent bestselling Toni Morrison work also set in Oklahoma, Paradise.