A rich collection of fine writing saved from obscurity: Commendable rescue work.
A tidy and well-ordered volume that collects nearly 40 Civil War short stories, memoirs, and reminiscences by the celebrated 19th-century writer.
Known today primarily as a satirist (on the strength of his Devil’s Dictionary), Bierce (1842–1914?) wrote some of the earliest and best realist fiction in the US. The product of a stern and God-fearing Ohio home, he enlisted with the Indiana Volunteers in 1861 and saw action in some of the fiercest battles of the war. Afterwards he settled into life as a journalist and editor and made a considerable success at both. (He was also a well-regarded poet whose work is much neglected today.) Although some of the pieces here (especially “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”) have retained their popularity down the years, most are long-forgotten resurrections, and some (like “A Sole Survivor,” about the fates of several of Bierce’s army comrades, all of whom died) were literally discovered in the corner of a library basement, uncatalogued and unknown. The war was perfect material for Bierce, who describes scenes of action with a reporter’s sharp sense of circumstance and an O. Henry–like weakness for the climactic twist: “A Horseman in the Sky,” for example, describes in great detail a sniper’s shooting of an enemy officer, revealing only at the end that the target was the rifleman’s father. Ironically, “Owl Creek,” the best-known of all Bierce’s works, stands out here as the least typical: The elaborate fantasy of a condemned man who dreams his escape in the final seconds before his hanging, the story has little of the stark, unvarnished bluntness (“The object at his feet resolved itself into a dead horse, and at a right angle across the animal’s neck lay a dead man, face upward in the moonlight”) that makes so many of the stories read like dispatches from the field.
A rich collection of fine writing saved from obscurity: Commendable rescue work.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-765-30244-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
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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