Keith does not exaggerate its historical significance but delivers an admirable account of a Southern city doing its best to...
The story of the devastation caused by the yellow fever epidemic in Memphis in 1878, which blighted the city for a generation.
Benefiting from an era when newspapers flourished and everyone wrote letters, Keith (History/Bloomsburg Univ.; Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight: Race, Class, and Power in the Rural South during the First World War, 2003, etc.) mines these rich sources to produce an extremely detailed, predictably macabre account. A regular feature of Southern life, yellow fever epidemics began in spring (when mosquitoes became active) and vanished with the first frost. Until scientists discovered the cause in 1900, doctors blamed poisonous emanations from rotting trash, filth and sewage, all of which Memphis possessed in abundance. Taxing hardworking citizens to provide free government services (e.g., sewers, garbage collection, clean water) provoked as much outrage then as today, and Memphis’ city government remaining stubbornly opposed. Everyone worried when yellow fever reached New Orleans in early summer and proceeded slowly northward. Despite ineffectual quarantine efforts, the first Memphis case appeared in August. Within weeks, 30,000 of the city’s 50,000 citizens fled, most of the rest fell ill, and 5,000 died. Disaster historians work best describing the background and the consequences but struggle to make the events themselves stand out, and Keith is no exception. The middle 150 pages feature the usual relentless parade of gruesome suffering, noble sacrifice and bad behavior (volunteers poured in; most died; Catholic priests remained and died; most Protestant clergy fled). Local heroes organized relief, and the nation responded generously.
Keith does not exaggerate its historical significance but delivers an admirable account of a Southern city doing its best to deal with a frightening, incomprehensible epidemic.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-60819-222-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
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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