An accessible, even inviting portrait of the professional killer, despite the gruesome detail.
A sympathetic revelation of the surprisingly poignant inner life of a pious Lutheran executioner.
A historian of early modern German history at Vanderbilt, Harrington (The Unwanted Child: The Fate of Foundlings, Orphans, and Juvenile Criminals in Early Modern Germany, 2009) has delved at length into a personal journal kept over a remarkable 45-year career by the executioner of Nuremberg, Frantz Schmidt; the journal reveals that he was keeping it for very public reasons. Schmidt began the journal at age 19 in 1573, when he was just an apprentice to his father, the executioner of Bamberg. After a stint as a journeyman, Schmidt attained the status of master by age 24 and procured a plum job in the thriving industry town of Nuremberg, where he plied his trade with exemplary dignity for the next 40 years, recording some 394 deaths and countless acts of flogging and torture. Some of the entries offer more detail than others, but overall, Schmidt shows he was a willing executioner, even a passionate one, in terms of his righteous sense of administering due punishment in the face of senseless, random injustice. He was also an abstemious, disciplined professional who brought rigorous standards to a trade notorious for its violence and instability. Moreover, Harrington reveals some subtle yet telling details in the journal, attesting to the scholar’s expertise in German and his doggedness in going back to Schmidt’s original manuscript rather than relying on later, edited versions. Despite its authorial diffidence, “an evolving self-identity became ever more pronounced,” as Schmidt shows his obsession with social standing and a sense of righting his own familial injustice. What he wanted was what everyone strove for: a better life for his children. A whole teeming world of Reformation Germany comes alive in this well-handled historical reconstruction.
An accessible, even inviting portrait of the professional killer, despite the gruesome detail.Pub Date: March 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8090-4992-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013
HISTORY | MODERN | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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 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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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