A moving debut coming-of-age memoir.
Hunt recalls his life as a 13-year-old on a Louisiana plantation just after World War II.
In 1946, the sugarcane plantation was still in many ways a relic of the antebellum South. Hunt, because his father ran the farming operations, had the privilege of living in the “Big House” near the African-American workers’ shacks in “The Quarter.” However, in this fine memoir, there’s no hint of condescension in the white Hunt’s interactions with the African-American families. Hunt felt welcome at the parties they held, and he enjoyed hearing performers named Nat and Ella and Lena singing from their radios. One of the field hands described Hunt’s father as “nearly ’bout like us colored folks, he ain’t got no land, no money, and he ain’t got much schoolin’.” Hunt was so color-blind that a well-meaning worker advised him that it would be best if he spent more time with those of his own kind. The suggestion arose mainly because he spent so much time with his best friend, a younger African-American boy nicknamed Papa. Their association was as deep as a boyhood friendship could possibly be, as illustrated by Hunt’s selfless efforts to help Papa learn to read and write. Although Hunt was well aware that the world beyond the dirt road was all-white—including his school and church—he was genuinely bewildered by warnings that his friendship with Papa could eventually pose a risk to both of them. The author intensifies the poignancy by revealing that the plantation was slowly dying, as workers migrated north instead of waiting to be replaced by postwar farm equipment. Meanwhile, Hunt kept right on reading Superman comics to Papa; however, the author doesn’t reveal what the boys thought about the plots of those fantastic stories. More significantly, Hunt’s detailed epilogue leaves out any information about Papa’s fate, which may disappoint many readers. Nevertheless, this is a beautiful memoir, and the author renders the lives along that dirt road with vivid, unforgettable humanity.
A moving debut coming-of-age memoir.Pub Date: Dec. 24, 2005
ISBN: 978-0979045400
Page Count: 190
Publisher: Bill Hunt Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2014
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 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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