A dark tale of murder all the more astonishing since it turns out to be true.
A true-crime drama follows the deadly exploits of a madman who always seems to stay one step ahead of the law.
Born in 1831, August Tuxhorn grew up in Prussia under the cruel tyranny of his father, Henry. When Henry committed suicide, August resolved to make his way to the United States with money he had long been secretly saving. He forged documents to allow him to leave the country, an act of fraudulence discovered by a fellow Prussian while August was in New Orleans. August murdered the man and a prostitute who discovered his hoard of cash. He then killed and framed the local banker for the crimes. August then made his way to Illinois, where he bought a large tract of land and began transforming it into a successful farm, becoming well-known for his violent temper. He married Elizabeth Birkenbuehl, a local waitress and fellow Prussian, and the couple gave birth to several children—Charles was the first and most unruly of all of them, made vicious by his father’s savage abuse. Eventually, Charles grew old enough to fight back, and August sent him to Kansas with a visiting cavalry regiment. Charles settled in Missouri and continued his father’s legacy of violence and murder, always slyly capable of evading arrest. He eventually married Eva Whitmore and subjected her and their children to grim mistreatment; he was finally charged with child abuse. Refusing to admit defeat, he liquefied his assets, killed his two sons, and burned his own property down to the ground, escaping yet again. Beltran’s (Trapped!, 2016) painstaking research is clearly evident, and her unadorned prose brings the story to vivid life. The author’s family story—she was adopted by Charles’ grandson, making the killer her great-grandfather—is a chilling one, and she intelligently raises probing questions about the lineage’s legacy of suicide and sadism. In addition, Beltran wisely leaves those questions without definitive answers, fodder for readers’ contemplation. The book reads like a novel, which clearly required some measure of fictional embellishment, a creative contribution supplied with skill and restraint.
A dark tale of murder all the more astonishing since it turns out to be true.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9896362-0-9
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Killing Time Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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