Skillfully captures a colorful mishmash of New York characters caught up in a moment of extreme public anxiety.
A terrifically overwrought buildup eventually leads to the turn-of-the-century murder trial and eventual acquittal of New Jersey chemist Roland Burnham Molineux.
Schechter (English/Queens College; The Tell-Tale Corpse, 2006, etc.) delights in setting the scene for this sensational American crime story, avidly and vulgarly publicized by the era’s yellow journalists. Molineux, profligate middle son of beloved Civil War hero General Edward Leslie Molineux, became superintendent and chief chemist in his father’s paint factory in Newark. Good-looking and athletic, Roland was a distinguished gymnast and insinuated himself as an officer at the gentlemanly Knickerbocker Athletic Club. There he ran afoul of club director Harry Cornish. Schechter suggests possible latent homosexual hostility between the two, a thesis supported by Molineux’s evident issues with impotency. He wanted to marry a young upstart singer, Blanche Chesebrough, but she preferred his more virile friend from the club, Henry Barnet. In a grisly turn of events, both Barnet and Cornish were poisoned in late 1898. Barnet died after taking a supposed hangover remedy mailed to him anonymously; Cornish escaped with his life after drinking from a bottle labeled Bromo-Seltzer, also sent by an unknown hand, that killed the cousin he boarded with. Clues gradually began to point to Molineux. The author excitedly notes the lurid coverage of lowbrow newspapers like Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s Examiner as a key factor in spreading mass hysteria about the case, which underscored America’s obsession with moral breakdown, sex and the vulnerability of the human body. Schechter describes such new crime-solving techniques as fingerprinting and forensics, and he takes a harrowing look inside Sing Sing’s Death House. Though he rehashes the evidence rather repetitively, crime buffs will relish the extra details.
Skillfully captures a colorful mishmash of New York characters caught up in a moment of extreme public anxiety.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-345-47679-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
