A full complement of seasons on Martha’s Vineyard, experienced from the common man’s perspective, by Carpineto (On Call, 1994, etc.). After visiting the island a number of times, Carpineto decided to dig deeper than the tourist surface, to gain a sense of why so many people think of the Vineyard as a special place. She wanted to take its pulse from the man on the street, not the glitter folk heavily associated with it, from Bill Clinton to James Taylor. For two years, on and off, she sampled each of the months and each of the towns, beaches, and festivals, and interviewed a slew of residents, both year-rounders and summer people, conservationists and developers, T-shirt sellers and boat builders, long-time citizens and new arrivals. She successfully contacts people who have interesting things to say about their circumstances or the history of their towns (in particular, her interviews with African-American residents of Oak Bluffs detail the genesis of its black community), or funny stories to relate about the island’s celebrities (much of this communicated to her in the usual way—at the hairdresser’s). And though she avoids gossip and never intentionally digs for dirt, she does uncover a mean seam in island life: substance abuse, physical abuse, unemployment—and the glaring class differences lurk in the background, unavoidable and often nasty. Carpineto passingly nods at the landscape, but her portrait of the Vineyard is painted with conversations, and if the people turn out to be eccentrics, so much the better: for instance, a square peg known as Johnny Seaview, whom she is sure will be the island’s archetypal original, but Carpineto is smart enough to know the oddities are a spice, and the main ingredients lie elsewhere. A shrewd look at Martha’s Vineyard, mercifully celebrity-free and pleasingly idiosyncratic within the quotidian. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-15584-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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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