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True Ghost Stories and Eerie Legends from America's Most Haunted Neighborhood

A well-researched, spooky slice of Southern American history.

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Dominé (Old Louisville, 2014) returns to Louisville’s local haunts in this smooth cocktail of history, architecture and the macabre.

“Who says you have to believe in ghosts to enjoy a good ghost story?” asks the author, a self-identified skeptic, as he opens the floor to more than just stories of urban legends and creaky floorboards. He introduces readers to the city of Louisville, home of the Kentucky Derby and Colonel Sanders’ universally recognized chicken. Since its founding in 1778, it’s become a “Victorian time capsule”—home to Millionaires Row, brooding Gothic churches and lavish mansions boasting Art Nouveau interior design. (It’s also home to once-controversial modern high-rises.) But for every humbling structure, Dominé notes, there’s an equally sinister accompanying tale. In one such story, a woman is tormented by loud knocks on her second-floor window and heavy footfalls on her staircase; after hearing them, she finds fireplace pokers laid out in the shape of a cross. In another particularly tantalizing fusion of history and legend, he tells a story of a hairless creature with massive wings who’s alleged to dwell on the spires of the Walnut Street Baptist Church. Those eager to dismiss the stories as flights of fancy may be surprised by the fact that an overwhelming number of levelheaded, sensible folks have allegedly had these encounters, making them lifelong, if reluctant, believers in supernatural phenomena. Likewise, Dominé’s skepticism adds an intriguing dimension to this collection. He occasionally relays stories whose historic origins can’t be traced, but he supports his most enticing tales with centuries-old images and newspaper headlines. In one impressive display of investigative journalism, he links Louisville’s Demon Leaper to a string of similar incidents reaching as far back as London’s legendary Spring-Heeled Jack. “Like so many of the legends and unsubstantiated stories in Old Louisville,” he says, “reports of these ghostly encounters suggest at least a tenuous connection with the past, a correlation borne out in neighborhood folklore and modern oral traditions.” His own unnerving experience at a séance at the city’s Spalding University provides a fitting endnote.

A well-researched, spooky slice of Southern American history.

Pub Date: March 14, 2014

ISBN: 978-1494289010

Page Count: 310

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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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

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BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME

NOTES ON THE FIRST 150 YEARS IN AMERICA

This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”

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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.

Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”

This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”

Pub Date: July 8, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Spiegel & Grau

Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015

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