An anecdotal and generally unreflective coming-of-age account set mainly in the Alaskan frontier. A former editor of Modern Photography, Scully endured an impoverished childhood: She and her older sister were placed in children's homes in San Francisco and later Seattle while their mother, Rose, a Jewish immigrant from Europe, struggled to make a go of it on the remote Seward Peninsula in and about Nome, working as a cook in a gold-mining camp, operating a roadhouse, and finding work in the home and shop of a Jewish merchant. Julia and her sister, Lillian, later followed their mother, living isolated but seemingly happy lives. Seasonal migrants, the family would shelter in Nome; it is here that Rose set up a housekeeping arrangement with Hessel, a liquor-store owner with a wife in San Franciso, who Scully claims ensured their isolation from the community and led Rose to seek an abortion, a fact gleaned by Scully years later. Nome, at the beginning of the war, when Scully was 12, bustled with sailors and marines, and in a town with few available women, young Julia has an eventful teenagehood. Soon after the war, she makes a break with the family and leaves to attend college. Scully's portraits of the gold miners, Eskimos, and sailors are warm and amusing, but throughout most of this short book, the depictions of Rose and Lillian are emotionally detached; Scully is unable, maybe due to her youth at the time and the subsequent span of years, to create an interior life for either member of her family, and her own emotions and concerns remain unrevealed, save for a sudden gush of self-awareness in the final chapters. This chronology of a hard and unusual childhood offers a good snapshot of the struggles of a Depression-era family in one of the more remote outposts in America, but it lacks the dramatic impact that these circumstances conferred upon the three women.
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-375-50083-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1998
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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