As the author admits, it was “a crazy idea that any inheritance might be worth claiming, no matter how small, no matter the...
Land schemes, political corruption, bad-old-boy networks, barbarous yahoos, and a man on a mission to secure his patrimony and his father's dreams: they’re all fine grist for the storyteller's mill, and Covington (Cleaving, 1999, etc.) makes the most of it.
In a moment of temporary insanity, the author’s father responded in 1965 to an invitation for “a few select men of outstanding character,” offering “exciting news about a 44,800-acre development in Florida called River Ranch Acres.” It was perhaps the archetypal land scam, and Covington senior plunked down his dwindling dollars on two and a half acres, sight unseen, for “raw land, traditionally the private reserve of the gentry,” a gesture at independence and the future. Years later, when Covington the younger tries to stake claim to his inheritance, he learns the whole of River Ranch Acres has been illegally taken over by a hunt club. Not some tony bunch, either, but a collection of vicious no-goods and squatters who protect their ill-gotten reserve by means of threat, force, and the compliance of the sheriff’s office. Dennis is a bit of a ne’er-do-well himself, so the dark, inexorable dance between him and the club has a grim quality from which it is hard to pry your eyes as he recklessly, righteously pursues his father’s folly. He belatedly decides that the quest for a patch of one’s own might be less mortally realized out in Idaho and slips into his father’s metaphorical clothes by obtaining some remote acreage. Bankruptcy renders these properties worthless in the eyes of the court and the bank, but in both instances Covington has realized a tenuous hold to the earth that gives him compass. Boy, did he ever need it.
As the author admits, it was “a crazy idea that any inheritance might be worth claiming, no matter how small, no matter the cost.” Thanks should be given that he stayed alive to tell this strange, headstrong tale.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-58243-295-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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