A vivid account of misfortune that may elicit simultaneous admiration and squeamishness.
Silverthorne (The Flatlands, 2014, etc.) commemorates his mother’s life by starkly depicting the abuse and addictions she suffered as well as the peace she ultimately found.
How much of Silverthorne’s work is an accurate portrayal of his mother’s life and how much is imaginative envisioning is never clarified in what may, therefore, be a fusion of fiction and biography. Darla, the narrator of her life story—although she only begins speaking in the first person in the third chapter, a shift from the third person that is unclearly artful or incidental—lies in the hospital in a “pain killer-induced haze” recalling the events of her life. She was recently stabbed by a homeless man for whom she had bought food—the first instance of Darla’s sacrificial kindness described in the narrative. The stabbing is the culmination of a lifetime of hardship, beginning with a “poor, harsh” Michigan-based childhood haunted by parental absence and alcoholism and, much more disturbingly, a horrifying incident of sexual violence. It is not the only such act to be depicted, and Darla is not the only victim in her story. Those she encounters, during both her heroin-addicted young adulthood and her subsequent career working at a treatment center, are often profoundly mistreated. Vividly characterized in all his or her idiosyncrasy, each is “another one of the guys that society simply wished didn’t exist.” Silverthorne imbues his work with striking detail; even characters who appear briefly to tell their somber stories are memorable. Part of that quality of being unforgettable, however, derives from the graphic reminiscences of characters’ victimizations, which often seem gratuitous. Not all of the gory details are needed. Their prevalence also dilutes the book’s larger plot, as the sequence of Darla’s life cedes focus to unconnected scenes introducing new characters. If the work becomes episodic during these events, it is nonetheless creditable for its attention to those with mental illnesses and addictions.
A vivid account of misfortune that may elicit simultaneous admiration and squeamishness.Pub Date: May 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1496111708
Page Count: 326
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2014
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
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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