Thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan, all dressed up like a society girl in Atlanta on Saturday morning, April 26, 1913, never made it to the Confederate Memorial Day parade. Her body was found in the basement of the National Pencil Company. She had been badly beaten and apparently raped. At first, the police “did what they always do in Georgia—arrested a Negro,” as reporter Harold Ross later wrote, but as the case became a media frenzy, politically ambitious Hugh Dorsey, the prosecutor, played on popular prejudice and went after Leo Frank, a Jewish, college-educated Yankee businessman and the pencil company’s superintendent. Alphin does a creditable job of unraveling the mess the trial became, a tangle of “lies heaped on lies,” and the rightly ambiguous title leaves readers wondering about two unspeakable crimes—the murder and the public lynching of Leo Frank. Each chapter opens with a dramatic quotation, and period photographs and reprints of newspaper stories contribute to a thorough accounting of a city’s judicial system at its worst. Fans of legal thrillers and courtroom dramas will find this outstanding. (list of major figures, timeline, glossary, further reading, author’s note, bibliography, source notes, index) (Nonfiction. 14 & up)
Pub Date: March 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8225-8944-0
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Carolrhoda
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
Subtitled “A concise guide to a century of contrast and change,” with “concise” as the key word, this slim survey takes sweeping, single-spread glances at wars, the decline of empires, show business, the battle for racial and sexual equality, the globalization of US culture, and other major themes of this century. Underscoring the text’s generalizations, the many full-color photographs are chosen to create pointed juxtapositions, matching, for instance, Marlene Dietrich to Buzz Lightyear, or impoverished parents and children in 1912 London and in modern Somalia. Selected events are highlighted both in chronologies on every spread and along a timeline that spans the last four pages. Too scanty for basic reference, and employing oversimplification (as well as the same photograph of Mickey Mouse twice) to a fault” “the culture of Hollywood, represented by the smiling face of Mickey Mouse, became the culture of the whole world”—this provides only a slim framework on which to hang some understanding of recent history. (charts, chronology, glossary, index) (Nonfiction. 10-13)
Pub Date: May 17, 1999
ISBN: 0-19-521488-9
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999
paper 0-395-97499-2 Introducing this overview of everyday life in a Plains Indian village circa 1868 is a map locating tribal lands of the Plains Indians. Contemporary Native Americans pose as models depicting the full regalia of the Cheyenne, Lakota Sioux, Crow, and Blackfeet. In re-enactment style, reminiscent of a visit to a living history village, each “actor” then personifies a member in the family of Real Bird, a northern Cheyenne warrior from the plains of southeastern Montana. A staged full-color photograph of family members engaged in role-specific work, leisure, food preparation, warfare, trade, and ritual is at the center of each spread, surrounded by additional text and captions that expand each topic. Sees the Berries Woman and Pretty Plume Woman demonstrate the construction of a tipi in a frame-by-frame, five-step procedure; warriors and chiefs hold council in a pre-battle ceremony; Timber Leader shows off a bearskin that gives him healing powers. Artifacts such as beadwork, weapons, tools, toys, and medicine objects lend authenticity to this informative survey and history of the culture. (chronology, glossary, index) (Nonfiction. 9-12)
Pub Date: Aug. 23, 1999
ISBN: 0-395-94542-9
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Clarion Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
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