by Elizabeth Cooke ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 2, 2012
Cooke itemizes the available details, but more importantly, she notes the questions that weren’t asked, the facts that were...
Novelist Cooke applies her considerable storytelling talent to expose the incompetent, ineffective investigation and 1781 trial of John Donellan in England.
Ne’er-do-well Theodosius Boughton needed only one more year to attain his majority and become the Baronet Boughton. The young heir had been infected with venereal disease at age 15 while studying at Eton. Learning nothing from his experience, he was reinfected multiple times and relied on an apothecary to treat him. He also kept a host of self-treatments in his rooms, including mercury and arsenic. At the end of August 1780, a new mixture from the apothecary was delivered to him and set aside for morning. His mother, instead of riding with her son-in-law, Donellan, stayed to ensure her son took his medicine, noting at the time that it smelled of bitter almonds. Theodosius immediately collapsed into a seizure. Donellan was called in, and he immediately took two empty vials and rinsed them out in the basin. Within 20 minutes, Theodosius was dead. Within hours of her son’s death, his mother arranged for the funeral, had breakfast and discussed her future with her son-in-law, whose wife would inherit much of the holdings. Throughout, readers will sense a distinct odor of English class-consciousness in this case, and there’s no doubt that Donellan’s lack of breeding played a considerable part. Why was Donellan accused of poisoning the victim when his mother administered the medicine? Why wasn’t the autopsy performed immediately by competent surgeons? The rulings of the presiding judge at the trial were blatantly slanted, and “expert” witnesses proved to be completely lacking in authority.
Cooke itemizes the available details, but more importantly, she notes the questions that weren’t asked, the facts that were not introduced, and the logical conclusions that never arrived.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8027-7996-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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