A thorough examination of two sisters’ property battles with the Atlas Portland Cement Company in Ilasco, Mo., in 1910—27. Ilasco was a company town whose story was first told by Andrews (History/Southwest Texas State Univ., San Marcos) in City of Dust (not reviewed). While conducting research for that book, he discovered in courthouse records the labyrinthine legal struggles of two sisters, Mollie Heinbach and Feemy Koller, who for nearly two decades combated agents of powerful Atlas for control of 26 acres which had first belonged to Samuel Heinbach, a blowzy, alcoholic eccentric with a malfunctioning sphincter. Having buried her third husband, Mollie—to the wonder of the other residents—courted and won Heinbach, then cared for him devotedly for two years until his death in 1910. His will, which left all to Mollie, was promptly contested by Heinbach’s other relatives, and thus began a 17-year deluge of lawsuits, hearings, stays, injunctions, trials, motions, and other madness, all of which Andrews fondly chronicles in this fascinating and ultimately melancholy account of two savvy sisters who quite literally fought city hall. Eventually, juries (all male) declared both women legally insane, Atlas acquired the property, and Feemy (who had eagerly entered the fray at her sister’s side) died, broke and broken, in a state mental hospital. In his excavations of newspaper archives and of county and state court records, Andrews has unearthed numerous treasures of detail—e.g., Mollie’s first husband bore the scars of knife fights, Mollie needed an ear trumpet to follow testimony in her sanity hearing. Neither a lyrical writer nor a stylist with a supply of fresh images (in this book, starts are rocky, gossip runs wild, and towns grow like mushrooms), Andrews nonetheless guides readers through this serpentine story with a sturdy, conventional clarity. A sympathetic portrait of two dynamic and determined women, whose case—a clash of “gender, class, and law”—illustrates the profound inequalities in early 20th century American culture and jurisprudence. (18 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8262-1240-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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