Engaging stories from a fabled place where many arrived broke and most left that way.
How a mammoth vein of silver ore—a “Babylon of the Great American Desert”—helped shape the West.
Washington Post Book World contributing editor Drabelle begins in 1857 on a mountainside on the Nevada side of the Sierras. Rumors of gold drew prospectors from the abandoned remains of California’s Forty-Niner rush. In the yet unnamed Virginia City, initial diggings quickly showed that the Nevada find would be of the silver variety. What would years later be revealed as a single vein stretching two miles long would, during the following two decades, yield a series of bonanzas interspersed with excesses of greed, deception and plenty of good times. Ironies, the author writes, began to spring up immediately. The Comstock Lode took its name from a blowhard self-promoter who was no good at mining or much else, and who eventually committed suicide. The flurry of “culture” drawn by the promised wealth included newspapers that employed journalists of the stature of Mark Twain (frequently quoted here) and Ambrose Bierce, yet were edited by men who published at the beck and call of the powerful. Drabelle is thorough in documenting conflicts with exploited Native Americans, the stress of hard-rock mining at deep levels where temperatures could fell a man in 15 minutes and the sheer technological innovation—later adapted across other industries—needed to process silver ore efficiently. The bulk of the narrative, however, involves the few who actually made off with the riches and how they did it: manipulating mining share prices down to buy them, up to sell them, assessing speculators for operating expenses, charging them fraudulently via ore-processing mills they also controlled—and, of course, buying the necessary judges and/or juries when stockholder or rivals’ lawsuits were launched.
Engaging stories from a fabled place where many arrived broke and most left that way.Pub Date: July 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-37947-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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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