In this powerful debut, Skerritt (Journalism/Florida A&M Univ.) uses the stories of African-Americans living in an impoverished South Carolina community to reveal the hidden scourge of HIV/AIDS throughout South.
The author attributes the spread of AIDS among Southern heterosexuals to endemic rural poverty particularly among blacks, concomitant social breakdown— broken families, drug addiction, promiscuity and prostitution—and the scarcity of resources that would allow public-health measures adequate to stemming the epidemic. The author began covering the AIDS crisis in 2000, after hearing the Rev. Patricia Ann Starr preach. The pastor of a local evangelic Baptist church in York, S.C., she is known for her work helping people with the disease and is a vocal advocate of safe sex despite her disapproval of promiscuity. Until her own sister tested positive for the HIV virus and her neighbors began dying of AIDS, she—like many Americans—had believed the disease to be confined to gay men living in urban areas like Chicago and New York. Skerritt writes movingly of families caught up in this tragedy and the group of health professionals who do their best to deal with the crisis. He cites shocking statistics—while the incidence of AIDS deaths decreased throughout the U.S. between 2001 and 2005, the opposite is the case in the Deep South—but notes that most of the funds to fight the disease have been funneled to the large northern and western cities. Skerritt deplores the fact that liberal politicians such as Hillary Clinton focus on funding for their own constituencies to the disadvantage of the small rural communities that are now under the gun. The author makes a strong case that the shame is not with the dying but with those who turn away from the reality of this epidemic.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-56976-814-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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