Intriguing, wide-ranging research informed by a confident point of view.
Friedman (Designing Casinos to Dominate the Competition, 2000, etc.) explores the history of Depression-era crime and politics, from Midwestern bank robberies to the Truman White House.
Friedman’s wide-ranging history orbits around one event and the questionable government response: the Kansas City Massacre of 1933, which the FBI blamed on Pretty Boy Floyd, but for which Friedman offers a different explanation. To build his case, Friedman presents the histories of four famous bank robbers—John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Alvin Karpis, as well as Floyd—and how Hoover used these criminals to transform his FBI from gunless accountants into a lawless police force. According to Friedman, Hoover established himself as America’s top cop—a “fourth branch of the federal government” whose agents were poorly trained and poorly managed. From this, Friedman moves on to the corruption of Kansas City politics, from the criminal underworld to the Kansas City political machine to the career of Truman and his “mobbed-up” White House. This approach to history makes interesting connections; there’s thematic consistency (crime and politics, political misbehavior, the fight for publicity), but his history sometimes has a fragmented style, particularly when he backs up to fill in readers’ knowledge. Also, while the writing is generally clear and conversational, Friedman puts almost all dates into the endnotes, which sometimes makes the timeline harder to follow. However, those points aside, this fascinating history is full of deep research into lesser-known true crimes and some interesting anecdotes, as when the townspeople of Boley, Okla., turn on the bank robbers. Occasionally, however, interpretations seem strained or hyperbolic, and Friedman’s warranted distaste for Hoover’s machinations sometimes leads him into a hectoring style.
Intriguing, wide-ranging research informed by a confident point of view.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1494958138
Page Count: 328
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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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