An informative, concise handbook to learning and giving.
Stone’s brief nonfiction debut chronicles her 40 days of seeking a more enlightened, more giving life, patterning the 40-day period on the Lent of her Catholic upbringing but broadening the ambit to include the widest possible spectrum of spiritual leanings.
“Whether you feel more in tune with God, many gods, Mother Earth, or your favorite song,” Stone writes, “everyone has their own way of feeling a sense of a higher source.” The key to Stone’s 40-day program was her dedication to looking outward and beyond herself; each day she explored a different charity, like Big Brothers Big Sisters, Heifer International, Veterans in Film and Television, Step Up on Second, the Leap program, and many others. Each day of this journey was a “charity endeavor.” The author names specific charities, reports on their origins and natures (usually with website URLs), describes their missions, and outlines her participation in their work. All of this is seamlessly and enjoyably interwoven with anecdotes from the author’s personal life—work, family, yoga, therapy—with thoughtful asides about the imbalances of modern life. “I’m thankful that my busy time only lasts for a season,” she writes at one point about a particularly busy period of work. “For many people, possibly the majority, there is no downtime when it comes to earning a paycheck.” This combination of personal dimension and charitable information has a twofold effect even in such a short book: It both humanizes the author and demystifies the whole process of engaging meaningfully with the world of charitable donations. Even readers not charitably inclined (a distinct minority in America, if recent polling is any accurate indication) will most likely find at least a couple of good causes in these pages—certainly Stone makes clearly worded advocacy for every charity she describes.
An informative, concise handbook to learning and giving.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 46
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 Yorkerstaff 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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