Review: 'The American Buffalo' is a spiritual step forward for Ken Burns

Ken Burns, American director of big multi-part documentaries on big American subjects, is back Monday with "The American Buffalo" on PBS. As history is the thing we need to learn from so as not to repeat it, or learn to repeat the good parts, even Burns' relatively lighthearted works, like "Baseball" and "Jazz," "Benjamin Franklin" or "Mark Twain" have some contemporary relevance.

But following last year's "," "The American Buffalo" — another story of genocide, and of survival — reads as especially urgent and of-the-moment, to the degree that his laconic house style can express urgency. It's as if the director had entered some late-career, late-life period, driven by the shortness of time, his, ours and the planet's. Like all