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BEYOND THE RIVER

THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE HEROES OF THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

Stirring, frequently astonishing popular history: a tale of selfless heroics to ease a nation's uncertain spirit.

Journalist and nonfiction author Hagedorn (Ransom, 1998, etc.) retrieves the largely unsung efforts of abolitionists in a small Ohio town who helped several hundred slaves escape to freedom.

The abolitionist movement was a uniquely local, community-based response to the centralized federal government’s attempts to maintain slavery in states that depended on it economically and to appease the interests of slaveholders. Though united in condemning slavery, abolitionists were undecided as to what to do with freed and escaped slaves: some advocated sending them back to Africa, others insisted on educating them and forcing them to convert to Christianity, still others favored isolating them in segregated farming compounds; only a very few were willing to accept black people as equal members of their communities. The author brilliantly selects a deceptively minor setting—Ripley, an out-of-the-way Ohio River shipbuilding village—to investigate these issues. The Reverend John Rankin, a shy, struggling Presbyterian minister until confrontation with the cruelties of slavery transformed him into a tireless crusader, serves as Hagedorn’s hero. After settling in Ripley in 1821, Rankin preached and wrote against slavery while sheltering and escorting to the Canadian border hundreds of enslaved Africans and their American-born children who had swum or crawled across the frozen Ohio River from the slave state of Kentucky. Hagedorn, herself a resident of Ripley, sympathizes openly with Rankin and his fellow abolitionists who risked life, limb, and prosecution by shameless law-abiding citizens who refused to see escaped slaves as anything more than stolen property. This is hardly a fault in a work of deep moral passion anchored in illuminating local particulars.

Stirring, frequently astonishing popular history: a tale of selfless heroics to ease a nation's uncertain spirit.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-684-87065-7

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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  • Kirkus Reviews'
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  • New York Times Bestseller


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  • National Book Award Finalist

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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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