An enthralling work of history told with intelligence and urgency.
Lawton chronicles the plight of Kevin Barry Artt, falsely convicted of murdering a prison official for the Irish Republican Army, in this nonfiction work.
Kevin Barry Artt grew up in Belfast during the 1970s and 1980s, a period during which tensions between the British and those Irish who longed for independence reached their violent heights, a turbulence vividly depicted by the author. Kevin was raised a Catholic, and was accustomed to the social sanctions that religious affiliation brought—he was beaten up for being Catholic as a child, and his father’s business was bombed (“Afterward, no one was charged in the incident. John rebuilt the garage and went back to work”). The young man did his best to avoid confrontation, but that became impossible when he started working as a driver for Ace Taxi in 1976; the Royal Ulster Constabulary assumed all the company’s drivers were IRA-affiliated men and therefore hated them, while Loyalists distrusted them as well. Kevin was harassed incessantly and assassination attempts were made on his life. When Albert Miles, a high-ranking prison official, was murdered by the IRA in 1978, Kevin was arrested for the killing, apparently on the strength of an identification made by an informant. Under extraordinary coercion, he confessed to the crime, and, despite his subsequent retraction of his confession, he was found guilty on 184 criminal counts and sentenced to life in prison. Miraculously, he was pulled into an IRA-orchestrated prison break in 1983 and made his way to San Francisco, only to be apprehended and tried yet again. The author, who served as part of Kevin’s legal team in California, paints a dramatically stunning tableau of his cinematic plight and of the grim tumult in Northern Ireland at the time. The rigor and expansiveness of Lawton’s research is simply astonishing, and his journalistic prose is exacting and powerful. This is by turns a terrifying and heartbreaking story, conveyed with impressive skill and moral clarity.
An enthralling work of history told with intelligence and urgency.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781960332264
Page Count: 506
Publisher: WildBlue Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
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 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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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