While some of the book tends toward the trivial, most of its anecdotes highlight life’s absurdities with wry humor.
A collection of blog posts focuses on the author’s experiences during a long life.
In his first book, Russell (Cold Turkey at Nine: The Memoir of a Problem Child, 2013) covers such difficult territory as the murder of his paranoid schizophrenic mother by his father. The author calls his latest work a “continuation of that effort to explain my life,” but it is made of more cheerful stuff, consisting of a diverting compendium of blog posts that illustrate his “meandering mind” and “lifelong tendency to find humor in the mundane, to try to entertain as well as inform, and to recognize my fallibilities and foibles.” Russell returns to his childhood on a Tennessee farm, but this time he fondly recollects activities ranging from mule skinning and tobacco harvesting to corncob fights and “throwing cherry bombs into quiet herds of cattle.” His humor comes through in a portrait of his grandmother, who would pull her long dress down to her ankles “to prevent NBC’s Chet Huntley and David Brinkley from looking up it as they broadcast the news” and who satisfied her sweet tooth by adding sugar to snuff. In later life, a street haircut in India has him wistfully recalling “those haircuts that Daddy gave me under a shade tree on our Tennessee farm when I was a little boy.” The author also exhibits an engaging sense of the absurd—a new restaurant near his former home in Texas promises, à la Arlo Guthrie’s hit song, “You can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant.” But when he visits it with his wife and friends, it is out of everything on the menu except hamburgers. Russell’s forays into travel writing are less effective and somewhat messy. He attributes the restrictions on private vehicle travel in Alaska’s Denali National Park in part to minimizing the number of people eaten by grizzlies. But there has only been one known fatal attack in the park’s history. A few of the volume’s snapshots are as dispensable as a Chinese fortune cookie, and some readers may yearn for something more substantial. But Russell's affable nature and evident wonderment at the world around him ultimately win the day.
While some of the book tends toward the trivial, most of its anecdotes highlight life’s absurdities with wry humor.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 447
Publisher: Booklocker
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 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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