A pleasing combination of skillful journalism and shrewd storytelling.
Bicycling executive editor and freelance journalist Howard unravels the tortured provenance of an original copy of the Bill of Rights.
In April 1865, souvenir-hunting soldiers from Gen. Sherman’s army ransacked North Carolina’s statehouse. One came away, probably unwittingly, with one of the 14 original copies of the Bill of Rights, which he carried to Ohio and later sold to the visiting Charles Shotwell for $5. The relic remained in the Shotwell family’s hands for more than 130 years, until his elderly granddaughters sold it to the seemingly reputable Connecticut antiques dealer Wayne Pratt for $200,000. Was the manuscript a legitimate spoil of war or, more likely, stolen property whose ownership would be immediately contested should it ever come forthrightly to market? Howard closely follows Pratt’s maneuvering to resell the prized document for millions, a story that quickly becomes part history, part mystery, part study in ambition, greed and betrayal—all the predictable passions that surround any great treasure. It gives away nothing to disclose that Pratt’s plan came to grief, ending in an FBI sting, with the parchment secured and resting in a Carolina vault. Fully aware of the incongruity between the noble sentiments of the Bill of Rights and the ignoble impulses he so fully explores, Howard introduces us to a remarkably shady land developer, a too-eager lawyer whose wife once headed Bill Clinton’s IRS, a bedazzled art dealer whose clients include Teresa Heinz Kerry, startled government scholars, inquiring reporters, tantalized museum officials, covetous governors of two states and clever law-enforcement specialists in stolen art and cultural artifacts. Along the way, the author provides informative asides about the often sleazy art and antiques world, the arcane preoccupations of document specialists, the hypocrisy of major museums and libraries (every bit as eager for distinction as the disgraced Pratt) and the remarkably careless governmental archival practices that, until recently, have placed many of our historical documents at risk.
A pleasing combination of skillful journalism and shrewd storytelling.Pub Date: July 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-618-82607-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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 Yorkerstaff 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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