Tales that smolder but never quite ignite.
A late writer’s stories about life, childhood, and racism.
Back in the dinosaur days of publishing, before computers and the Internet, a fledgling writer getting a story published was akin to jumping into a pool of piranhas: he closed his eyes and took the plunge, hoping that his work would live on. So it was with Meyer, who during his lifetime was never quite able to crack the magician’s code of consistent publication. Now his son, Christopher, has gathered 12 of his father’s stories and self-published them. The stories vary in length from one to several pages. Some are written from a child’s perspective, such as “Memorial Day”; others, such as “A Cheap Substitute,” apparently contain autobiographical elements. Baseball is the subject of several pieces, as well. Running through many of the tales is a theme of racism and its insidious, casual presence in everyday life, as in “The Man Baseball Almost Left Behind,” which on the surface is a by-the-numbers interview with former ballplayer Enos “Country” Slaughter but is actually about Jackie Robinson breaking baseball’s color line. Another story dealing with racism and baseball is “Before the Asphalt Cooled,” which again uses Robinson as the story’s catalyst. Meyer is a good, descriptive writer: “Aunt Maude’s powdered white cheek looked like pie dough.” Overall, there’s nothing wrong with any of these stories, as they’re all interesting, but perhaps the best way to describe them is workmanlike; they lack that certain something, that certain spark, that makes a story leap off the page and insist on publication. Today, the stories might move to the front of the pack, but when publishing was far more competitive, space was limited, and good stories were routinely bumped for great ones; these stories likely just failed to make the cut.
Tales that smolder but never quite ignite.Pub Date: June 25, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 74
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2015
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 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
