by Beverly Lowry ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 2, 2022
Lowry’s dry wit, honed sentences, and careful way of connecting the dots make her case: This is quite a story.
The details of a 1948 murder in small-town Mississippi anchor a personal account of class, race, and justice.
The author of numerous novels and works of nonfiction, Lowry has created a signature genre that combines deeply researched true crime with memoir—e.g., Crossed Over (1992); Who Killed These Girls? (2016). Her latest focuses on the murder of Idella Thompson in Leland, Mississippi, just a few miles from the author’s hometown of Greenville. Thompson was hacked to death in her home in the middle of the afternoon, suffering more than 150 blows from a pair of pruning shears. Her daughter Ruth Dickins, who reported the death and was found at the scene in blood-soaked clothing, claimed to have interrupted "a Negro" in the act of murder. Despite a two-week manhunt, this hasty fabrication could not be supported, and Mrs. Dickins was tried, convicted, and sent to a prison farm. Police never uncovered the true motive, though both women were known to be "high-tempered and difficult." Lowry was 10 at the time of the crime and followed the trial and its aftermath along with everyone else in the Delta. Though few doubted Dickins was guilty, the governor received petitions for her release every year. Others saw class bias in the call for clemency and thought she should stay right where she was. "Before suspending Mrs. Dickins's sentence," one woman suggested, "the governor [should] get the pictures of Mrs. Thompson's body and see for himself the mercy and consideration she gave her mother." Lowry chronicles the checkered fortunes of her own, less prominent family alongside those of the Thompson/Dickins clan, and though these stories have no real reason to be conjoined, the author uses both to illustrate the effects of the changing mores and social structure of the period. At one point, she was selected by her school to appear in a TV segment in which White students—“dumb as fence posts”—made the case against desegregation.
Lowry’s dry wit, honed sentences, and careful way of connecting the dots make her case: This is quite a story.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-525-65723-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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