A thoughtful meditation that will appeal to animal lovers and readers interested in tales of small communities coming...
A freelance journalist’s account of a zoo that became the symbol of hope—and later, tragedy—for a small Nebraska town.
Dick Haskin never expected to open a zoo in tiny Royal, Nebraska. A farmer’s son who loved animals more than people, Haskin dreamed of working as a primatologist after watching a film about Jane Goodall in his early teens. However, when he graduated from college in 1983, he found he had to take jobs in zoos, which he “truly, viscerally, hated,” rather than Africa. But a chance meeting with Dian Fossey at a primatology conference brought with it the opportunity to work at her research center in Rwanda. Fossey’s murder not long afterward dashed Haskin’s original plan, but in its place arose another idea that involved opening a primate center in Royal. Haskin acquired a chimpanzee named Reuben and a trailer, but he set his sights on creating “a first-class facility” that would become both an important research center and a boon to the local economy. Despite climbing attendance and a donation from Nebraska native Johnny Carson, by the late 1980s, Haskin and his foundation were “running on fumes.” Bickering board members had no interest in raising the funds necessary to transform Haskin’s vision into reality. The center—later known as Zoo Nebraska—eventually fell into other hands that managed to expand the number of animal attractions and tourist visits but also earned the enduring enmity of larger zoos that saw ticket sales decline. Power struggles involving zoo directors and its board members also ensued. In 2005, Haskin’s quixotic dream ended in violence when law enforcement officials shot and killed three escaped primates, one of which was Reuben, Haskin’s “best friend.” In this easily digestible portrait of small-town life, Vaughan compassionately and understatedly traces the evolution of one man’s grand vision and the petty politics that destroyed it.
A thoughtful meditation that will appeal to animal lovers and readers interested in tales of small communities coming together.Pub Date: April 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5039-0150-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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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