A nostalgic, entertaining look at gun culture.
In this collection of essays and fictional stories, a hunter, gun collector and competitive shooter shares his lifelong passion for guns.
Hirsh comes from the long lines of Virginians and West Virginians who treasure guns. “Seriously, if we had a flag, there’d be a gun on it,” he says. He’s also a retired English teacher and college professor who, as a researcher, decided not to join the National Rifle Association in order to maintain objectivity. The nation remains divided over guns, Hirsh writes, and he sees two sides: those who’ve grown up hearing how bad guns are and the “gun culture” that takes pride in its heritage. The first group may not like his book, but the second group will. Hirsh’s more affluent forebears include one whose company provided the water system for the Manhattan project and, later, infrastructure at Kennedy Space Center, “[s]o we are a family of plumbers who have always loved guns.” Some family-centered tales are almost reverent, such as the WWII–era story “Uncle Gene’s Carbine,” and some are hilarious, including “Supermodels and the Pigeon King,” in which Hirsh’s Cosmo-editor stepsister visits the farm with supermodels who use his Ruger 10/22 rifle to unload on a stale pastry (“Time to meet your maker, muffin!”). Hirsh is all business, however, when discussing gun safety, as he does in the essay “Shooting Up,” about some irresponsible shooters he encouraged to leave a public range. One of his most stirring fictional pieces, “The Sentinel,” tells of a single mom who, after getting a gun to protect her family, is dismayed when she has to use it. In “Bambi’s Nightmare,” Hirsh recalls the rural high school where textbook stories about animal rights “drove my students nuts.” Hunting was a way of life for them, and in 14 years at the school, Hirsh lost nine students to car and ATV accidents but none to accidental shootings or gun crime. There are some typos, but the book is well-written and largely jargon-free. Hirsh says his goal was simply to write “a friendly cultural acquaintance, not a scholarly study” about guns, and in this, he succeeds.
Pub Date: July 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1494877637
Page Count: 188
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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