Occasionally uneven in the narrative flow, but mostly profound and enjoyable reading.
A young man charts the geography of his tumultuous childhood against the expansive backdrop of the Great Plains.
After his parents divorced, Garrett-Davis’ life was suddenly split between Pierre, S.D., and Portland, Ore. He spent much of his early years not only trying to process the abrupt dissolution of his family, but also keeping the secret of his mother’s lesbianism from the inherent backlash of South Dakota’s conservative culture. For years, the state’s right-wing governor, Bill Janklow, loomed like a flesh-and-bone boogeyman in the author’s mind. Despite the old hostilities, Garrett-Davis finds significant meaning in his home state’s “landscape of motion” and its long history of transient personalities. Deep sojourns into the weight and significance of nascent punk-rock record collections happily exist alongside intense observations about the demise of the great bison herds and even efforts to restart the Pleistocene epoch. Such meditations reach back further still, to the 65-million-year-old fossilized bones of a Tyrannosaurus Rex named Sue unearthed on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation in 1990. Hiding a mother’s true identity, enduring a father’s simmering hostility and resisting South Dakota’s often oppressive culture undoubtedly made life hard for the author in his intensely introspective youth. After becoming firmly established in his new life in the East, Garrett-Davis nevertheless finds himself gazing at the Bronx Zoo's captive bison, struggling to grasp the narrative of his own life on the Great Plains. He largely succeeds, recognizing that seemingly opposite concepts of leaving and returning, embracing and rejecting, building and destroying may not be as mutually exclusive as they seem.
Occasionally uneven in the narrative flow, but mostly profound and enjoyable reading.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-316-19984-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
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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