In Susan A. Brewer's fascinating The Best Land , she recounts the story of the parcel of central New York land on which she grew up. Brewer and her family had worked and lived on this land for generations when the Oneida Indians claimed that it rightfully belonged to them. Why, she wondered, did she not know what had happened to this place her grandfather called the best land. Here, she tells its story, tracing over the past four hundred years the two families―her own European settler family and the Oneida/Mohawk family of Polly Denny―who called the best land home. Situated on the passageway to the west, the ancestral land of the Oneidas was coveted by European colonizers and the founders of the Empire State. The Brewer and Denny families took part in imperial wars, the American Revolution, broken treaties, the building of the Erie Canal, Native removal, the rise and decline of family farms, bitter land claims controversies, and the revival of the Oneida Indian Nation. As Brewer makes clear in The Best Land , through centuries of violence, bravery, greed, generosity, racism, and love, the lives of the Brewer and Denny families were profoundly intertwined. The story of this homeland, she discovers, unsettles the history she thought she knew. With clear determination to tell history as it was, without sugarcoating or ignoring the pain and suffering of both families, Brewer navigates the interconnected stories with grace, humility, and a deep love for the land. The Best Land is a beautiful homage to the people, the place, and the environment itself. Brewer's debut The Best Land strives to answer haunting questions of her youth with uncanny subjectivity. Intensely researched. ― The Rumpus It's very good upstate nonfiction. ― WAMC Northeast Public Radio A compelling and important story of how the earliest European settlers―including the author's own family―used deception, outright theft, squatting, under-compensation, and the indigenous reliance on oral tradition to take and keep the largest portion of the Oneida land in the Mohawk Valley. Drawing on meticulous research, The Best Land by Susan A. Brewer tells remarkable stories from the intertwined families of those in the Oneida Nation and Brewer's ancestors to deliver the ultimate lesson that the history of a fertile region can be expanded far beyond the official records. -- Debra Bruno, author of A Hudson Valley Reckoning Susan A. Brewer was born in Oneida, New York, and is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, where she taught the history of American foreign relations. She is the author of To Win the Peace and Why America Fights .