A meticulous, exhaustive history of moonshining, poverty and Blue Ridge culture.
A scholarly dissection of the 1930s moonshine-based economy of Franklin County, Virginia.
Filmmaker and author Thompson (Cultural Anthropology/Duke Univ.; The Old German Baptist Brethren: Faith, Farming and Change in the Virginia Blue Ridge, 2006, etc.) uses his family's history in Franklin County to delve deeper into the subject of moonshining, as well as the federal government's effort to halt its production. While the author focuses on the trial that all but toppled the illegal industry, far more interesting is the local color. Thompson brings the area to life, offering a portrait of a place that the government forgot, a blue-collar town run amok with barefoot children and well-armed men. With an utter lack of resources, county citizens were forced to “invent an economy from scratch”—homemade liquor became the primary cash crop. However, Thompson argues that the guilty parties were not merely the moonshiners, but those who overlooked the crippling poverty that plagued the town. “Without a doubt,” he writes, “some [moonshiners] were honest and hardworking and made whiskey for some cash money for their families. Others were out for profits well beyond a simple leaving.” The author paints an overly sympathetic portrait of a crime-filled town, but he does so for good reason. This is a story as much about a culture wilting away as it is about the crimes that were committed there. As the moonshiners might argue, seeking a way to feed one's family can hardly be considered a crime. The town offered few alternatives, writes Thompson, and the people of Franklin County filled every jug they could for profit.
A meticulous, exhaustive history of moonshining, poverty and Blue Ridge culture.Pub Date: May 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-252-07808-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Univ. of Illinois
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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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