Walstad brings a keen eye for social history to her family chronicle.
A history that chronicles the challenges of a group of immigrants who traveled from northern Europe to the New World.
Walstad’s (Ecology of the Planted Aquarium, 1999) ancestors were part of a wave of immigration to America in the mid-19th-century. Their new lives were still full of challenges—the author’s relations from Sweden, for example, spent their first winter, “a bitterly cold one, huddled together in a drafty shack” in Minnesota—but they persevered, and most of them eventually achieved a slice of the American dream. In this book, Walstad uses a remarkable array of sources, including diaries, interviews, and family photos, to vividly portray her people, piecing together not only a family chronicle but also a timely social history of the immigration experiment. It initially travels through the Old World countries of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands, where the author says that a “declining national economy, hard labor, and 10 children” may have sent her great-great-grandparents “to early graves.” He tells of how one Danish relative, a 28-year-old spinster, “must have hoped that emigrating would increase her marital prospects, for three of her sisters had found husbands in America.” After the author’s great-grandfather John Walstad, an alcoholic who had deserted his wife and children, died of a heart attack in Iowa, his eulogy stated only: “Thus ended a life ruined by whiskey.” Perhaps most compelling are the author’s dissections of the fraught dynamics on her mother Margie’s side of the family: after Margie’s mother died of tuberculosis, her sister was adopted by an aunt and joined a household that “simmer[ed] with distrust and resentment.” Tracking the various branches of the author’s family tree may be a little daunting for some readers, but she skillfully adds detours into various other subjects, such as the scourge of tuberculosis—which claimed the lives of several of her relatives—and the Los Angeles oil rush that began in the 1890s.
Walstad brings a keen eye for social history to her family chronicle.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Echinodorus Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2016
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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