A homeless blogger’s moving search for salvation.
Collected blog entries from Peters (Abandoned, 2009), who, in 2005, became homeless.
The author, who endured significant childhood trauma, later lost control of her life after the failure of a relationship. With little warning, she found herself destitute on the streets of Brighton, England, with her car as her only major possession. After living in her vehicle for five months and failing to find work in the seaside town, she drove to London in search of job opportunities. There, on a deserted laneway surrounded by trees, she found a parking place that effectively became her home. Venturing into the city, the author was drawn into a library, where she decided to start a blog about her hand-to-mouth existence using the name WanderingScribe. The blog connected her with the wider world and provided her with raw material for this, her second book. In apparently unedited entries, the author describes the fear and vulnerability she felt when sleeping in her car, including the excruciating pain of lying contorted on uncomfortable seats and the horrific thought of being murdered in the night. The blog entries chart her unsteady path into dislocation and mental illness as she became increasingly paranoid. They’re also a testament to the author’s indefatigable resilience, as even the most rudimentary of tasks, such as her daily religious ablutions, were fraught with difficulty. At one point, she describes how she attempted to disguise herself as an orderly in order to use a hospital’s showers. This is a very real story of not being able to find warmth or afford the price of a cup of tea, and the blog entries’ erratic style reflects the increasing urgency of the author’s situation as she fluctuated between hope and despair. Overall, this collection conveys the trauma of homelessness with artful simplicity.
A homeless blogger’s moving search for salvation.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2013
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 141
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
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
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