An exhaustive compendium of postwar misery.
A true-crime exploration of notorious London murders.
In the early 1950s, more than 80% of the British population subscribed to a newspaper. Nothing sold better than lurid stories, accompanied by photographs. When four women’s bodies were uncovered behind a bricked-up wall in a West London boardinghouse, the tabloids struck gold. Exhaustively researched, if woodenly written, the arrest of John Reginald Halliday Christie, his trial, and his eventual execution serve as a narrative clothesline upon which hang detailed biographies of the key players, set amid a racist and misogynistic society slowly emerging from the rubble of the Blitz. Christie and his motives remain opaque; after sexually assaulting and murdering one of his victims, he “had a cup of tea and went to bed.” The coverage of the trial by Harry Procter, a crime reporter for the Sunday Pictorial, a newspaper that financed the defense, and Fryn Tennyson Jesse, suffering from morphine addiction and blindness, humanize the pressure brought to bear on journalists delivering the all-important “scoop.” Both used the trial for personal vindication while illustrating the media’s pandering to lurid spectacle. Sometimes, the abundance of detail detracts from the central focus. Do we need to know Cecil Beaton has a hangover when taking the Queen’s coronation photos? The book is more effective when detailing the hardship of working-class life, particularly in the haunting biographies of the victims themselves, their families, and their upbringings. The true heartbreak lies in its depiction of poverty-stricken young women who were sex workers or much-less-well-paid cleaners and domestic servants, some sleeping in public lavatories. The cruelty and indifference meted out to them strike the reader as true crime.
An exhaustive compendium of postwar misery.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593653630
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | WORLD
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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