An event of racially charged intimidation, captured on film, has lasting repercussions for two women.
Margolick spent 12 years researching the interlocking histories of Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan Massery, two students—black and white, respectively—who simultaneously attended Arkansas’ Little Rock Central High School in the 1950s. Eckford, a smart student with lawyerly aspirations, was strictly raised in a squat, crowded house. Massery, the daughter of a wounded World War II veteran, was brought up poor but hopeful and easygoing, and she frequently played with black children as a girl. Though “Little Rock in the Eisenhower era was a racial checkerboard,” writes the author, its looming high school still became the first Southern institution to become desegregated, which sent Eckford, along with eight other school board–selected black student “trailblazers” (the “Little Rock Nine”), into predominantly white classrooms. This fact incensed the 15-year-old Massery, who, backed by 250 angry, prejudiced white citizens, severely bullied Eckford, an action that was captured and immortalized on film by newspaper photojournalist Will Counts. Massery remained remorseless as the fallout from her actions included denouncement from both segregationists and the general public. Eckford, together with her integrated classmates, would go on to endure years of abuse in school. Margolick’s impressively thorough examination is unique among other Central High exposés in that it incorporates updated material culled from media sources including interviews with eight of the school’s nine black students and statements in Eckford and Massery’s own words. Both of these women, he writes, were unenthusiastic about revisiting their ordeal, even to simply set the record straight—which the author accomplishes with graceful tact. Decades later, Massery’s atonement and redemption manifested in an amicable but disappointingly short-lived friendship, joining Eckford as she accepted presidential accolades and while antagonistically interviewed on Oprah. The narrative concludes with the pair’s discordant severance. “At this point,” he writes, “only Photoshop could bring them together.” Riveting reportage of an injustice that still resonates with sociological significance.
Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-300-14193-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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