From the recently, tragically deceased author of Common Ground (1985), a brilliant but flawed portrait of class warfare in early- 20th-century America. Two-time Pulitzer awardee Lukas's ostensible subject is the 1905 assassination of former Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg and the subsequent trial of three officials of the Western Federation of Miners, accused of ordering Steunenberg's death in retaliation for his role in the military suppression of a violent 1899 strike in Idaho's Coeur d'Alenes mining district. This is merely a jumping off point, however, for a ramble through the thickets of America's industrial, political, social, and cultural structures at the turn of the century. When Pinkerton operative James McParland (one of the book's many titanic personalities) emerges as a key player in the prosecution's efforts to convict William Haywood, Charles Moyer, and George Pettibone, Lukas pauses to recap the history of private detective agencies—in England as well as America. When Clarence Darrow enters as a defense attorney, we get 28 pages of biography before rejoining his clients in Idaho. The story of the army regiment that put down the Coeur d'Alenes unrest; the character and career of each major reporter covering the trial; the fractures within the Socialist Party—Lukas crams all this and much more into a massive, unwieldy text. Many of the digressions are fascinating, all of them showcase the author's superb analytic gifts and powerful prose, but Lukas fails to distinguish the relevant from the merely intriguing. The background material unquestionably gives depth to the book's grim depiction of a nation enmeshed in virtual civil war, with capital and labor equally willing to employ unsavory tactics and the government almost always on the side of the big boys. Without the aid of a coherent story line, however, the narrative ultimately suffocates in excessive detail. Provocative, maddening, deeply disturbing—a fitting epitaph for a man who in everything he wrote asked Americans to look at their nation's unvarnished reality. (First printing of 100,000)
Pub Date: Sept. 10, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-80858-7
Page Count: 880
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1997
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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