An engaging read enhanced by wit and a passion for social justice.
A baby boomer’s debut memoir places the author’s experiences within the context of broader cultural and world events, all from an unabashedly liberal viewpoint.
Caplan, grandson of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, was born in 1949 and grew up—and still lives—in Wallingford, Connecticut, just outside of Hartford. “I was born here, all right, but I am hardly what you would call a Connecticut Yankee. My family and I are over 220 years too late to America for that distinction,” he writes, setting the pleasantly edgy linguistic tone of the narrative. His 1950s and ’60s childhood was a happy one. Prep school at the Blair Academy in New Jersey was followed by Antioch College in Ohio, where Caplan went on to enjoy the indulgences that readers often associate with boomer counterculture—plenty of music, sex, and drugs. (“I know lots of people who cannot run for president. Too many people saw us roll, smoke, inhale, sniff, or swallow something—often, and with gusto.”) He intended to travel and be a writer but returned to Wallingford to help his mother when his father died in the winter of 1974. Caplan whiplashes back and forth in time. One moment he is in the present, talking with his dog Clio, and the next paragraph, he’s decades in the past. Even when reflecting on earlier events, he doesn’t always stick to a sequential timeline. The stream-of-memory retrospective can be confusing. Intriguing Americana tidbits are tucked into family history: for example, Caplan describes how midcentury suppliers of larger independent supermarkets like the one his father owned “dropped off” individual railroad cars “in the railroad yards of small towns and big cities....Then they sent the key to the locked boxcars to the owner of the supermarket.” And well-known factoids are presented with Caplan’s unique style of juxtaposition: “In 1970, Colin Powell was a soldier in Vietnam. He was thirty-three years old. Dick Cheney was twenty-nine. During the Vietnam War, Dick Cheney received five deferments from military service.” Still, this remains an enjoyable, free-wheeling review of the life of a boomer.
An engaging read enhanced by wit and a passion for social justice.Pub Date: Dec. 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5328-5295-4
Page Count: 284
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2017
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 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
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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