An understated memoir about a lost time in a remote place. Late in life, Montana resident Percy Wollaston (190483) set down a series of autobiographical sketches for the benefit of his grandchildren. The manuscript found an interested outside reader in British journalist Jonathan Raban, who used it as a primary source for his book Bad Land (1996). Raban, who contributes a foreword to this book, made literature of Wollaston's life, but Wollaston is no slouch as a writer himself. He ably describes the hard life of pioneer families on the Great Plains, men and women like his parents who traveled westward with the railroad in the early decades of the 20th century to find a bit of fertile land they could call their own. But what they found was closer to a desert, ill-suited to most kinds of cultivation. ``The land itself was inexorable,'' he writes. ``The bed of some prehistoric ocean, it had tolerated only the creatures that were best able to survive, resisting even the elements.'' The struggle to subdue the land broke many of those newcomers, Wollaston records; whole families were laid low by cold weather, drought, disease. As Raban notes, Wollaston is a keen student of detail, and his passing remarks on the way that, for example, plows were shaped to ensure the best tillage or how skunks were trapped for their pelts will be of much interest to students of Americana. Wollaston captures a Montana between eras, no longer the Old West but not yet quite settled. It was a time when, as he writes, cowpunchers still shot up a saloon because they thought it was expected of them—but then apologetically left money behind to cover the damage. As a document of the last days of the frontier, this guileless memoir is of much value. (20 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-55821-602-2
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1997
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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