An intensive examination of lynching in Alabama and its ties to the evolution of Southern racial violence.
Hollars (Creative Writing/Univ. of Wisconsin-Eau Claire; editor: You Must Be This Tall To Ride: Contemporary Writers Take You Inside the Story, 2009) puts a creative spin on his analysis of three lynching cases in the American South: innocent victims Vaudine Maddox (1933), Gene Ballard (1979), and Michael Donald (1981), all violent Alabama murders that became serpentine investigations riddled with false accusations, cover-ups and the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan. With meticulous detailing, the author describes the three cases, individually and, in concluding updates, how they coalesce. In Tuscaloosa, Maddox’s lifeless body was found pummeled by stones; her murder, in turn, spurred the lynching of three young black male suspects. White police sergeant and family man Gene Ballard was shot in cold blood while investigating a botched bank robbery in Birmingham; two years later, his murderer, Josephus Anderson, a local black troublemaker, was freed on a mistrial. This event sparked an act of violent retribution, resulting in the 13-looped noose, revenge lynching of innocent, 19-year-old Michael Donald in Mobile by two admitted Klansmen, an event that, after a guilty court ruling, ended up bankrupting the United Klans of America faction. Hollars’ text is scholarly and comprehensive but delivered in a fresh, far-from-dry journalistic style. Along with a wide range of source materials like media articles, official statements and interviews with police and local Alabamans, a section of archival photographs (some grisly) provides a humane nuance. The author is also quite astute at drawing meaningful comparisons. He discusses Donald’s lynching in 1981 alongside the murder of gay man Matthew Shepard in 1998, each established as a “hate crime” and further solidifying the terminology in police work and legislation alike. A creatively written, edifying work of historical significance and a boon for those interested in Southern race relations.
Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8173-1753-9
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Univ. of Alabama
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
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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