An entertaining true-crime period piece built around a chillingly odd sociopathic villain.
The engrossingly bizarre tale of a murder plot within Los Angeles real estate circles.
Journalist Jacobs ably captures the seamy backdrop of 1970s Southern California via the strange saga of acquaintance and prominent Angeleno Jerry Schneiderman. “Over two years,” writes the author, “he said not a peep about how he transformed himself from a picked-on Jewish kid from a throwaway section of L.A. into a successful developer/public advocate with an infectious cackle. Never once did he mention that he was the weak tip in a murder triangle.” Jacobs describes this milieu as chaotic yet ambitious: “This is what hungry companies did in the late-seventies LA of social experimentation. They fed the need, caring little if it were for a chiropractor, pop psychology gimmick, or conglomerate.” The murder improbably germinated due to an ill-fated partnership in an upstart space-planning firm comprised of charismatic Richard Kasparov (whose financial chicanery would imperil the business), workaholic Jerry, and their foreman Howard, “a fair-skinned Charles Bronson” whose competent exterior concealed a spiraling violent rage. About Howard, the author wonders, “why did an old-school construction chief with a trick back, nervous wife, and a union card decide to mortgage his soul?” Following workplace conflicts, Howard recruited hapless underworld figures for an ambitious murder-for-hire scheme, starting with his erstwhile partners. After numerous bungled attempts, which Jacobs plays for humor and tension, Howard’s gunman succeeded in murdering Richard. He then confronted Jerry with insults, threats, and blackmail, noting, “I’ve killed before Richard and gotten away with it. And I’ll do it again—with you.” Eventually, Howard was arrested but not before subjecting Jerry and others to protracted trauma. Notes the author, “Should Howard get out, prosecutors still believed, some of those who dared to tell the truth about him would ‘be as good as dead.’ ” (Howard died in prison.) Jacobs writes in a pulpy, flamboyant style that mostly masks some repetition and digression.
An entertaining true-crime period piece built around a chillingly odd sociopathic villain.Pub Date: March 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64428-191-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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