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HEP-CATS, NARCS AND PIPE DREAMS

A HISTORY OF AMERICA'S ROMANCE WITH ILLEGAL DRUGS

A history detailing how, as a society, we have both used drugs and tried to suppress them. From Jonnes's sometimes numbing welter of facts a two-stranded history emerges. One strand follows major clusters of drug users, from the 19th-century ladies with their spiked elixirs, to impoverished, rootless men who became ``pleasure addicts'' after WW I, to young blacks who, excluded from postWW II, middle-class hopes of getting ahead, turned to drugs as a way to be hip, becoming ``deliberate outsiders''; to middle-class whites who took drugs mainstream in the '60s and '70s, with Hollywood adding an aura of glamour to it all. Another, largely separate narrative strand follows large-scale trafficking and our half- hearted efforts to stop it. Although Jonnes discusses criminals, notably Arnold Rothstein, who in the 1920s established a drug-supply system superseded only by that of the Colombian cartels in the 1970s, more fascinating is our government's ambivalence about trafficking. For years the Bureau of Narcotics was led by Harry J. Anslinger, who was more interested in seeming tough than getting results; he ignored corruption in his agency and discouraged scientific research into addiction. Meanwhile, high-level US cold warriors could overlook drug trafficking provided it was conducted by anti-communists, such as members of French military intelligence in Indochina in the 1950s or, more recently, the Contras in Nicaragua. Oddly, after recounting how governmental unreliability and corruption have compromised efforts to reduce addiction, Jonnes puts her faith in law enforcement to reduce the supply of drugs, a move she sees as crucial to long-term change. But the toughest question remains: Will a law-and-order approach produce results or just more Anslingers? Duller than a book on the ``romance'' of drugs should be; but still better on what has happened than on what to do about it. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-684-19670-0

Page Count: 496

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1996

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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