A thoroughgoing but occasionally plodding story that awaits a better writer. For now, though, this is the best available...
An examination of the spasm of violence popularly dubbed the “Texarkana moonlight murders.”
Texas historian Presley (A Saga of Wealth: The Rise of the Texas Oilmen, 1978) doesn’t much like that name, since the eight murders of late winter and spring 1946 took place in different moon phases—but always deep in the night. As the author notes, Texarkana, split between two states, was a town where crime was constant and violence frequent; still, serial murder was quite another thing. Presley writes portentously of the windup to this savage, strange episode: “The snow melted. The weather grew cooperative. Fears of a roving mad dog evaporated. The war was over. What could happen next?” What could happen did happen: A sociopath scared the town into near-paralysis, drawing the attention of law enforcement officials and the press nationwide. Presley’s narrative takes us through the cat-and-mouse chase that served up dozens of suspects before narrowing in on several likely cases, and he concludes that justice was eventually served, if it wasn’t quite as neat and evidentially definitive as in these days of forensic analysis and DNA testing. Much of the narrative is given over to showing where the investigation was right—surprisingly often, given the paucity of clues and evidence—and where it was wrong, as well as to looking at the key players. The asides into criminal psychology, however, are too plentiful—e.g., “The offender failed to develop a conscience at the critical age and never will”; “He probably didn’t think of it in the way normal persons would have, insuring tragedy for everyone, himself included.” The inexpert prose diminishes the compelling interest of the story itself, though anything with Texas Rangers in it is likely to hold the attention of readers.
A thoroughgoing but occasionally plodding story that awaits a better writer. For now, though, this is the best available account of a crime that, though a cold case, still has people talking.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1605986425
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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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