An often dry but sometimes-piquant saga of Jewish people in the Old West.
The spectacular death of an unknown tightrope walker opens a window on a small-town Texan Jewish community in this debut historical study.
Yarin investigates the colorful legend of the enigmatic “Rope Walker,” an otherwise nameless man buried in the Jewish cemetery in Corsicana, Texas. He was, according to town lore, a man with a prosthetic leg who, in 1884, attempted to traverse a high wire across the town’s main intersection while carrying an iron stove on his back. When he fell and was fatally injured, he asked for a Methodist minister but then said that he was Jewish and proved it by reciting some Hebrew prayers with a Jewish businessman; he then died before revealing his identity. Yarin weighed many long-after-the-fact accounts of the incident for their plausibility and found them a tangle of ill-sourced, sometimes-contradictory rumors. They offered just a few wispy leads, including a report of another one-legged tightrope walker, “Professor Berg,” said to be operating nearby. The trail led him to take a deep dive into Corsicana’s history and to reconstruct backstories of many locals, including the area’s Jewish families; the Methodist minister, a charismatic revival speaker and author named Abe Mulkey; the doctors who may have attended the Rope Walker; assorted gentile town fathers; and other residents or passersby of note. He also includes the legend of a ghost of a murdered sex worker, said to have haunted the hotel where Rope Walker died, and the story of an ornery circus elephant who gored a Corsicana matron to death during a 1929 rampage and was executed by firing squad.
The author, a genealogist, devotes much of the book to a detailed, if sometimes rambling and disjointed, account of his intricate sleuthing through online newspaper databases, census entries, Civil War veterans’ records, municipal archives, and town maps. Researchers, amateur genealogists, and history mavens will find this procedural engrossing, and Yarin arrives at a nifty solution to the riddle of Rope Walker’s identity that vividly fleshes out his picaresque life. (Part of his act, it seems, was using the stove he carried onto the tightrope to cook pancakes while teetering above his amazed audience.) The author’s portrait of Corsicana’s Jewish community is equally detailed, but less intriguing; there were a few ex-Confederates and a tragic suicide among them, but most of its members were simply prosperous and rather staid. Much of his writing in these chapters consists of flat, perfunctory genealogical notes that read like obituaries: “I.N. Cerf (Dec. 23, 1873-June 21, 1935), Louis’s son, was born in Corsicana and lived his whole life there….He was the State National Bank President when it erected its new building, in 1926.” But when Yarin meditates on Rope Walker’s character and exploits, his prose is moved to a lyrical exuberance: “His spirit of adventure, his courage, his jousting with the fates was a lifestyle worthy of respect and deference….his full life will be celebrated, and not just lamented, in chiseled verse.”
An often dry but sometimes-piquant saga of Jewish people in the Old West.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73536-230-4
Page Count: 396
Publisher: 248 Ancestors
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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