Transfers impassioned gun control arguments from blog post to book, with limited success.
An online gun-control movement presents its arguments in book form.
Written under a pseudonym associated with online organizing and offline attention-grabbing, debut author Yerguns makes the book’s tone and intended audience clear from the opening pages: “If someone’s more upset by bad words than by a classroom of first-graders getting blown away by a maniac with an AR-15, they are the problem.” The book is clearly not intended to present a measured argument to Second Amendment purists or National Rifle Association members, but to animate gun control advocates and provide a framework for responding to common arguments advanced by gun proponents. Yerguns encourages advocates to pursue a strategy similar to the fight against drunk driving in the 1980s, holding up Mothers Against Drunk Driving as a model for organizing and lobbying, and places the anti–gun-control movement in historical context with a concise overview of the NRA’s evolution in recent decades. Sound statements (“Just as sexual assault needs to be understood more broadly than a masked Bad Guy jumping out of the bushes, it’s equally ridiculous to think of ‘gun crime’ solely in terms of masked Bad Guys robbing banks”) and statistics are mixed with references to “gunhumpers” and more splenetic fare (“And over the last 20 years, Lott’s book of fairy tales has had the shit debunked out of it”). With font changes, cartoon illustrations, memes, and Facebook screen shots scattered throughout the text, the book often has the appearance of a blog transferred to paper without additional editing. Frequent underlined text, apparently intended as a hyperlink but without the inclusion of the Web address, is of limited value. Yerguns advances entirely reasonable ideas with understandable fire. The book’s lack of polish and unsuitability to the format, however, hampers its effectiveness as a tool of advocacy.
Transfers impassioned gun control arguments from blog post to book, with limited success.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 88
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2016
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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