A sad, loosely constructed memoir of a girlhood troubled by ``emotionally erratic and undependable'' parents and a family legacy of alcoholism and mental illness. Paterson (Journalism/Univ. of Maryland) grew up in Alabama during WW II. Reexamining her difficult childhood, she focuses primarily on ``the class warfare'' between her parents and on the death of her mother at 31, when Paterson was nine. Differences between her mother's family (slave-owning planters whose fortunes sank with the Confederacy) and her father's (Northern reformers who founded Alabama's first college for blacks) not only cause conflict in a marriage already marred by addiction and depression, but, Paterson notes, reflect a fundamental tension between progressive and conservative postbellum southerners. This historical-social context might have been explored more fully; its sketchiness contributes to the vacuum in which remembered events unfold, as does the first-person, present-tense narrative. Absence of adult perspective initially hampers Paterson's overarching goal—to make sense of the past—especially at the beginning of the book, which covers family history and early childhood memories. However, this narrative strategy amplifies the emotional impact that parental fighting, drinking, and sexual misconduct have on their four children. Paterson recreates a child's-eye view of family conflict: disjointed, only vaguely comprehended, then internalized to a frightening degree by an increasingly troubled girl. The memoir's strength lies in the portrayal of this internalization, and in the author's resolving it 50 years later, producing what she calls ``the `help' note finally written, not only for the suffering that was mine, but for all who suffer in childhood and think, as I did, that the pain of forgetting is less than the pain of remembering.'' Paterson's moving, intensely personal story of survival and adult reconciliation with childhood trauma impressively delves into family history and the nature of memory while avoiding self-help bromides. (8 pages photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-374-27226-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
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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