Timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Birmingham bombing, this account, though ineptly written, does wrap up a...
The overly detailed story of a decades-late and yearslong investigation into the 1963 Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, in which four young black girls were killed.
Thorne, a retired Birmingham police officer, focuses on two men: Ben Herren, a Birmingham police sergeant (later an FBI analyst), and his partner Bill Fleming, an FBI special agent. In 1997, Herren and Fleming were assigned to reopen the investigation into the bombing, which had been investigated twice before—once in the 1960s by the FBI and again in the ’70s by the state; the first was closed with no convictions, and the second led to a single conviction. Sorting through mountains of old files, the men compiled lists of possible witnesses, including Ku Klux Klan members and their associates and relatives. Tracking down these people, many of them now old and sick, and then interviewing them and persuading some to talk, took years. In 2001, and again in 2002, a suspect was brought to trial and convicted. Thorne presents the arguments of both the prosecution and the defense in these two trials. The portrait of the two hardworking, persistent investigators contrasts with that of the violent Klansmen, a powerful force in 1960s Birmingham. If Southern racists are the villains, the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover also comes across badly, with the Alabama attorney general later accusing the bureau of refusing to share evidence and thwarting the state’s first investigation. Thorne attempts to guide readers through the long years of interviews by providing a front-of-the-book list of names; it helps, but some judicious pruning would have made for a smoother, more readable story.
Timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Birmingham bombing, this account, though ineptly written, does wrap up a sorry episode in the city’s history and may have considerable local appeal.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61374-864-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 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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