A stimulating search for self and place set against the vast backdrop of the American West.
One woman's search for community and connections in Utah.
By moving from bustling California to a small town in Utah, Stephens hoped she and her husband would learn to love a place they could call home. In this literary debut, she describes how buying an old farmhouse, with its inherent history of previous owners, was just the first step in settling in. Visiting rodeos, raising chickens, learning to ride a horse, watching their Mormon neighbors attend church and family gatherings—all aided Stephens in her quest. She developed a keen love of the desolate landscape and mountains surrounding their homestead but worried that encroaching housing developments would alter her perception of time and place. Despite her feelings for this place, her husband was less satisfied, and both struggled to find work to support their new child. Stephens' lyric, visually detailed prose will remind readers that building a home can take more than just time; it takes a sense of belonging, of roots that stretch deep below the topsoil. "I do not think the locals are cute and a charming part of the scenery,” she writes. “I think they carry within them something magic, as do, it turns out, people everywhere who have stayed still in one place long enough to accrue this grace: a deep sense of place that I wish I could beg, barter, or steal off of them." As the seasons stretched into a few years, Stephens still was not content. In the end, she moved on, in search of another spot in another small town where she could settle down, set some roots and make a house a home.
A stimulating search for self and place set against the vast backdrop of the American West.Pub Date: March 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8032-4354-5
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
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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