A lively and informative treatment in which one man’s rise and fall opens a window onto a long-overlooked historical...
How discovering the truth about her banker grandfather enabled the author to unlock much that has been forgotten about the Great Depression era.
A chance conversation with her father launched Echols (History and Gender Studies/Univ. of Southern California; Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture, 2010, etc.) on an investigative journey that included attempts to elicit remembrances from her mother and visits to libraries in search of the real Walter Davis, a building and loan officer in Colorado Springs. The discovery of boxes of material after her mother died was crucial. The family had passed down the story that the unmentionable grandfather was an embezzler, and he was driven to suicide after desperate efforts to generate cash from his life insurance policies to pay off some of the creditors of his insolvent bank and try to provide for his wife’s future. In the author’s hands, her family’s story becomes a counterpoint to Frank Capra’s feel-good romance It’s a Wonderful Life, with Jimmy Stewart as the small-town banker. But it is more than that, as Echols sets Davis’ story against the background of the financial excesses of the 1920s, which led inexorably to insolvency, bankruptcy, and the catastrophe of the Great Depression. Like her family’s own history, much of this back story has been largely hidden or blocked out, but Echols revives it. Back then, excessive house construction and shady mortgage finance led to insolvency and financial collapse, a situation that calls to mind current practices. Throughout, the author’s personal story meshes well with her history of building and loan associations. “The collapse of these associations,” she writes, “like the all too common failure of state-chartered banks, affected millions of Americans.”
A lively and informative treatment in which one man’s rise and fall opens a window onto a long-overlooked historical landscape in all its finely drawn detail.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62097-303-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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