Royster (Louisiana State Univ.; The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans, 1991) has previously proven himself a master at providing fresh and significant historical interpretations through historical narratives. Here, he has momentarily lost his touch. A tale that spans more than a century, has a cast of characters manyfold greater than War and Peace (requiring a genealogical scorecard to keep straight), and a staging as baroque as Les MisÇrables, this book gives the impression of being a large story for many smaller stories’ sake. Loosely tied to the extraordinary history of efforts to develop and profit from the great Dismal Swamp lying between Virginia and North Carolina, the book takes us across the history of 18th- and 19th-century Virginia and over the seas to Africa, Britain, and the Continent as well. Everyone worth knowing (half, it seems, intermarried) and some scoundrels besides walk the stage. Land is the main character, the hunger for land to grow rich by the drama’s engine. The Father of the Country plays a leading and honorable part. Minor characters are as diverse and well-drawn as any in a Dickens novel. And marriages, deaths, feuds, and sudden turns of fortune fill the adventure with life. But in the end Royster is defeated in his efforts to control his materials. There is simply too much—too many stories and not enough theme or argument. It’s hard to tell what the author wishes us to come away with—pleasure at riveting tales (characteristically well told, to be sure) or a deeper understanding of the most important colony and state in the century surrounding the American Revolution. If the latter, he fails (as he does not in his previous, prize-winning works) to tell us what that understanding ought to be. A great sprawl of a book—artful, entertaining, informative, deeply researched (163 pages of notes), but in the end frustrating. (20 illustrations, 5 maps, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 3, 1999
ISBN: 0-679-43345-7
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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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