A satisfying book of travel throughout the Green Mountain State, mixing guidebook and essay. Husher, a New England journalist and writer, knows her home state well. Her intention in this ’subversive” book’subversive because, she says, it centers on “things overlooked and perhaps undervalued because they do not fit comfortably into the larger frame——is to take her readers into little-known corners of the state, far from the usual tourist itineraries. In this she succeeds admirably, visiting places such as Barre, the center of a surprisingly active radical politics in the early years of this century; Randolph, where the fortunate Justin Morgan developed the hard-working breed of horse that bears his name; and Lake Champlain, where, locals say, there lives a weird serpent to rival Scotland’s Loch Ness monster. Along the way she points out good rest stops, ice-cream parlors, coffeehouses, country churches, statues, and gardens, studding her little essays with anecdote, reminiscence, and tidbits of local history. Husher, in the manner of an on-the-bus tour guide, sometimes tries a little too hard to be chatty and funny, dishing up groan-inducing lines like “The only trouble with cemeteries is that the people in them are all dead.” But she’s pleasantly self-effacing, and she knows her stuff; for one thing, her quick take on the history of a New England literary genre, the Indian Captivity narrative, is a real gem. “These essays may persuade you to make an inexpensive but satisfying junket to Vermont, or they may persuade you there is no wonder greater than the one of being exactly, precisely where you are.” Husher’s entertaining, well-written book is likely to inspire more than one vacation to retrace her steps, and armchair travelers will enjoy it as well.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-88150-427-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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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