An entertaining and often surprising look at real-life frontier justice.
Long offers a colorful and informative look at the evolution of criminal justice in 19th-century Oregon.
As a longtime newspaper reporter for the Oregonian and Oregon Journal, the author covered the Oregon State Penitentiary through the tenures of three wardens, and as an instructor, he taught writing classes to inmates there. This book describes how the area’s penal system evolved over the tumultuous four decades between the Hudson’s Bay Company’s establishment of Fort Vancouver in 1824 to the cornerstone-laying for the first Oregon State Penitentiary in 1871. In the early 1800s, the region known as Oregon Country was bigger than present-day Texas, including all the land west of the Rockies “between Russian Alaska and Spanish California.” Officially shared by United States and Canada, the area was mostly occupied by the Hudson’s Bay Company before the mid-1840s. Long traces the region’s justice system from public floggings at the fort to more sophisticated ideas in the growing city of Portland, where “the penitentiary as we think of it was still a new invention.” The book’s depiction of law enforcement is a far cry from the sheriffs, posses, and gunslingers of Hollywood westerns, although it features equally colorful characters. These figures include the fort’s founder, John McLoughlin, a former surgeon and fur trader; his critic, the Rev. Herbert Beaver, whose ego was “exceeded only by a lack of common sense”; and professional kidnapper Bunko Kelly. Long’s journalism background is clear in his vivid descriptions, sharp observations, and engaging historical narratives. He discusses how social attitudes and laws changed as a region of scattered fur traders and homesteaders transformed into a place of farms, businesses, and full-fledged towns. Readers may not be surprised to learn that boondoggles and corruption developed hand in hand with political institutions; four out of five members of Portland’s first city council, for instance, “had dealings with the city that wouldn’t pass the smell test today.” The book, which also provides copious citations, a timeline, and an afterword, amply demonstrates that “prisons and prison policy deserve our attention and more than sideshow treatment in the national debate.”
An entertaining and often surprising look at real-life frontier justice.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781735129839
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Bottlefly Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2025
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
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
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