A rambling collection of a family’s early female history–more possibility than solid fact.
Historical and genealogical accounts of a family's Southern ancestry.
What are the questions that you'd ask your great-grandmothers or your tenth great-grandmothers? This is the question and the premise that underscores The Spirit in the South. Organized into interpretive essays, chronologies, notes and recipes–reflecting grandmothers from six related family lines–Forde attempts to piece together a narrative for her family's women from the 1600s though the early 1900s. Although she acts as the book's main author, Terry and several cousins also contribute, creating a cluttered and uneven tone. The first chapter, which reveals a scene in the life of Elizabeth Hamlin Jarrard, opens with details of early colonial Virginia circa 1699. Elizabeth sits smoldering in a church pew, covered in heavy layers despite the August heat. She thinks about how until William and Mary took the throne in 1688, the sovereigns changed so frequently that her parents were confused about whom they owed their allegiance. Scenes like these offer a window into the times but give little insight about the day-to-day lives of the women. As a minister, Forde focuses many of her interpretive essays on religion and church rituals. Some provide interesting history, such as how her Dutch ancestors held Christening feats as elaborate as weddings which sometimes lasted six weeks. Other passages simply recite church vows and prayer customs, again adding little depth to the stories. The book records the women's Southern culture–with plantation houses, slaves being willed from one relative to the next and proud patriots fighting not the Civil War but "the war between the states." Forde paints all of the women as strong and independent, surviving death, cross-country relocation, multiple marriages and invalid husbands. These accounts weave tales equally from fact and imagination.
A rambling collection of a family’s early female history–more possibility than solid fact.Pub Date: April 14, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4343-5654-3
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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