Still, an important, absorbing addition to the vast Lincoln library.
Meticulous reconstruction of the relationship between Mary Todd Lincoln and Elizabeth Keckly, a former slave who became the First Lady’s personal dressmaker and confidante.
Fleischner (English/Adelphi Univ.; Mastering Slavery, not reviewed) brings to light a compelling story long obscured by events of greater consequence. She begins with a post-assassination meeting in New York City between Mary and Lizzy during which the emotionally damaged and deeply indebted widow revealed to her friend a plan to raise money by selling the scores of gowns she wore during her White House years. (The plan, we find out 300 pages later, failed miserably.) Then the author moves back to chronicle in alternating chapters the biographies of Mary Todd and Elizabeth Hobbs, the former born into a fairly prosperous slave-owning family in Lexington, Kentucky; the latter born into slavery in Virginia. It takes 200 pages for their lives to converge. By then Lizzy had married a man named Keckly (who soon vanished), become a talented and popular seamstress, purchased freedom for herself and her son at the enormous price of $1,200, and established herself in Washington, D.C., as the favored seamstress of such luminaries as Mrs. Jefferson Davis. Lizzy and Mary met on the eve of Lincoln’s first inauguration, when Mary ordered the first of what would be many dresses. The relationship, argues Fleischner, grew into a friendship as Lizzy helped Mary with everything from childcare to shopping to grieving. It fractured, however, when Lizzy, who had damaged her own business to attend to the First Widow, elected to publish a memoir. This was much too uppity for proud, frangible Mary Lincoln, and the two never met again. The author provides many fascinating details about fashion and mantua-making, although she could have omitted much material available elsewhere about the rise of Abraham Lincoln and horrors of the Civil War.
Still, an important, absorbing addition to the vast Lincoln library.Pub Date: April 8, 2003
ISBN: 0-7679-0258-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
