A sensitive literary endeavor to honor a delicate, devastating past.
A family’s experience is bounded and warped by the violence and instability that overtook Colombia in the last half of the 20th century.
Esther Angarita Samiento, Ramírez’s grandmother, came of age in Colombia’s hills, alongside the country’s decades of upheaval and turbulence, “La Violencia,” launched by the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in 1948. As corrupt Conservative leaders struggled to keep power, and Liberal revolutionaries led their crusades into ever-greater extremity, Samiento started and grew her own family, expanding their business and land holdings among several fincas. Samiento’s story reflects familiar themes for women of her generation, particularly in a conservative Catholic country—individual dreams forfeited to marital expectations, jarring personal betrayal, and stoic grief. But the consuming brutality of Colombia’s economic and political struggles provides a distinct shape to Samiento’s experience. In stately and solemn prose, Ramírez, a writer and critic, outlines a series of eventful shifts in the national history at the fringes of her family’s story, shading their experience with gruesome details of murders in close proximity, as well as with illegitimate elections, American entanglement, and drug trafficking. But the author’s work is first and foremost a familial history; the roots of her family’s trajectory are complex, encompassing colonial projects, political experimentation, and geographical and agricultural details. Her attempts to shade in these contours grant color and context to the personal, but cannot give full clarity. As she writes, “Colombia is a land of many truths,” and the particular experience of her ancestors is but one example of how the pursuit of ideals rubs against lived reality, in an environment where the gravitational pull of violence and turmoil is virtually inescapable. Drenching the family narrative with the frail complexities of love and memory, Ramírez decouples it from Colombia’s relentless and stereotypical violence to claim her own piece of its story.
A sensitive literary endeavor to honor a delicate, devastating past.Pub Date: April 14, 2026
ISBN: 9781501145209
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
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