by Brian Kevin ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 20, 2014
A minor but well-intentioned and entertaining entry in the ever-growing library of Thompsoniana.
A footnote to renowned journalist Hunter S. Thompson’s yearlong adventure in South America, which Thompson recounted with zest in The Proud Highway and elsewhere.
With zest, yes, but with some padding and stretching of the facts here and there. Travel writer Kevin does good work in following Thompson’s path across the continent, occasionally correcting the details, to revisit the places where the gonzo master lived and worked—some of them places that, readers of The Great Shark Hunt will remember, were thick with gringos who thought nothing of driving golf balls off penthouse decks into the teeming streets below. (“Golf,” one local rightly remarked to Kevin, “that’s only for the elite.”) Kevin spends much of his time, as did Thompson, in Colombia, where, half a century ago, Thompson marveled with thinly disguised fear at an epidemic of rural violence that left unfortunates beheaded and otherwise lifeless. Kevin updates the portrait by noting that among the last of the guerrillas in the Colombian outback, “there isn’t much ideology left, just a fanatical devotion to drug profits.” (Never mind that Thompson might have funded a squad or two with his consumption habits.) Kevin’s forays to places such as Machu Picchu have a by-the-numbers travel journalism feel, but when he’s onto meatier matters, he turns in memorable work—as when, for instance, he digs up some long-forgotten pieces that Thompson wrote in 1962 for the Brazil Herald, an expat publication with a readership in and around Rio de Janeiro and São Paolo of about 7,000. Writes Kevin, nicely wrapping up his perambulations, the paper’s society column “had a slightly glib, above-it-all tone, and I imagined it appealing to people like the British rooftop golfer and his well-connected chums.”
A minor but well-intentioned and entertaining entry in the ever-growing library of Thompsoniana.Pub Date: May 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7704-3637-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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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 Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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