Michener and staff have produced a collage, now appearing in the Reader's Digest, of graphic second-hand accounts, reconstructions of student life and town sentiment, interpretations and misinterpretations of the Kent State events of May 1970. About the shooting itself, the book says the Guard was not surrounded; no order to shoot was given; there is no evidence of a sniper and much evidence that the Guards were not all afraid for their lives. It was, however, "not murder," but "a tragic accident": a "riotous condition," if not a real riot, prevailed, and Michener insists that hard-core revolutionaries were out to force a confrontation, as if their intent proves their responsibility. This claim is backed up chiefly by testimony that people with NLF flags were standing on the sidelines and yelling revenge slogans afterward. Coeds' profanity, which receives countless repetitive references, assumes the proportions of a second major cause; Cambodia itself and the national pattern of uprisings are given infinitely less weight. On the one and foremost hand, Michener stresses campus visits by SDS leaders over the years, and at psychologically key points he interpolates nonsense about Cuban funding of SDS (his most highly praised source is Eugene Methvin, ultraconservative author of The Riot Makers) and about radical plans to make Kent a regional focus of their efforts. In other spots he acknowledges that the campus "straights" were passionately anti-war and anti-draft, that many moderates were glad to see the ROTC building burn, and that "disorders" were "much, much worse" on other Ohio campuses. There are long pontifications about how the "new life style" touches the most apolitical students, along with an equation between life-style and "Marxist-based" worldwide student revolt. In his descriptions of the teaching assistants, so inflammatory as to invite further witch-hunts, as in his imputation of uncanny powers to the activists, Michener is making mischief; but especially in the epilogue he covers himself with a plea to spare peaceable radicals and junior faculty for the sake of free-flowing ideas. As a work of interpretive journalism, it is far less scrupulous than I. F. Stone's Killings At Kent State (1970).
Pub Date: April 30, 1971
ISBN: 0449202739
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1971
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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