In three portraits, two reprinted from The New Yorker, Wilkinson (Big Sugar, 1989; Moonshine, 1985, etc.) examines the lives of people who earn their living on the water. ``The Blessing of the Fleet'' finds Wilkinson traveling to Provincetown, where for generations Portuguese-Americans have fished the waters off Cape Cod. In ``The Riverkeeper,'' he follows John Cronin, ``the only person in America to list `riverkeeper' on his tax form,'' as he patrols the Hudson. The third portrait, ``The Uncommitted Crime,'' delves into the lives of the Tlingit Indians of Admiralty Island (Alaska), whose culture has been almost completely destroyed by US rule. All three pieces are strong, quietly drawn portraits that derive much of their power from the accumulation of carefully selected facts, some of which are mind- bogglingly strange: Parts of the Hudson River floor, Wilkinson writes, are paved a foot-deep with beer bottles. Wilkinson is a meticulous and thoughtful stylist, capable of grand poetic moments (``All the clouds were swept to the edges of the horizon, as if the sky were a great big dance floor, and you could see the details on the hills and a woman at a window in one of the houses watching us go by''). And he manages to pull the first two portraits together to satisfying resolutions, although ``The Uncommitted Crime,'' while more unusual in subject matter and more ambitious in scope, doesn't work quite as well. Occasionally slow-moving and elusive, it fails to give a solid sense of what modern-day Tlingit life is like. Overall, skillfully wrought, evocative insights into little- known arenas of American life.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1991
ISBN: 0-394-57313-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1991
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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