Moore’s complex and fascinating story deserves better treatment.
Amateurishly written, disappointingly superficial biography of Sara Jane Moore.
Freelance journalist Spieler has a rich subject in the psychologically disturbed middle-aged housewife and erstwhile FBI informant who fired twice at President Gerald Ford as he left the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco on September 22, 1975. Not long after her arrest, Moore contacted the author, then a reporter at the Los Angeles News Journal, and the two had sporadic contact during the next 28 years. In 2003, Moore suggested that Spieler write a book about her, but the writer soon balked at her ground rules and they fell out. Unfortunately, this did not dissuade Spieler from going ahead with her slipshod biography. She interviewed a mere handful of Moore’s acquaintances and family members, most of whom apparently had little to say. Her text leaves yawning gaps in Moore’s story; one 11-year period is glossed over with the excuse, “attempts to find documentation on the decade that followed were futile.” Instead, Spieler includes largely tangential chapters on San Francisco’s radical underground and the FBI’s counterintelligence program; in the final chapters, she quotes liberally from court transcripts for pages at a time. The biography does little to explain Moore’s motives for the assassination attempt; readers will come away knowing little more about her than they might get from the book’s dust jacket. Jess Bravin’s exhaustively researched Squeaky (1997), the biography of another would-be Ford assassin, ably brought to life the violent and chaotic era in which Lynette Fromme lived. Spieler’s scene-setting, by contrast, is trite in the extreme: “Bob Dylan wrote those now-famous lines, ‘the times, they are a changin’ and true to those words, Sara Jane changed with the times.”
Moore’s complex and fascinating story deserves better treatment.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-230-61023-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
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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