Explodes off the blocks and proceeds with grace and fluidity.
From the author of Cinderella Man (2005), another true-life tale of an underdog asserting his worth with a sports triumph.
Schaap, the host of ESPN’s Outside the Lines, seeks to cut through the apocryphal tales that sprang up in the wake of Jesse Owens’s record-breaking performance at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin by drawing on accounts from sportswriters, eyewitnesses and the athlete himself. He attempts to get inside Owens’s head while exploring everything from Hitler’s alleged snubbing of black athletes to the nature of the unlikely friendship between the American track star and German long-jumper Luz Long. Like many African-Americans of the time, Owens (1913–80) grew up in poverty and grappled with discrimination. While at Ohio State, he pumped gas for hours each day to support his wife and young child; even though he’d tied several world records on his high-school track team, he was not offered a scholarship. Success and controversy followed. He endured accusations of obtaining money from the Ohio state legislature without having earned it, racy tabloid stories of romantic trysts and questions about the genetic advantages of black athletes. With the help of high-school mentor Charles Riley and college coach Larry Snyder, Owens qualified for the Olympics. After a lengthy debate about whether participation in the Nazi Games was ethical—a discussion that had special resonance for African-Americans, whose circumstances bore striking similarities to those faced by Jews—the U.S. chose to take part, setting the stage for Owens to show the world a true superman not descended from Aryan stock. The author offers an in-depth story whose only flaw is its narrow timeframe, depriving readers of a look at Owens’s later years.
Explodes off the blocks and proceeds with grace and fluidity.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-618-68822-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2006
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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