Part memoir, part cultural criticism, entirely fascinating.
An award-winning poet wonders what it means to be a witch.
There is an idea that those who describe themselves as witches are following traditions that can be traced back to an ancient, woman-positive, nature-based religion—and that those who suppressed its practices were afraid of anyone who didn’t fit neatly within a patriarchal society. This is the version of the past Nuernberger was seeking when she first started reading histories of witchcraft and the transcripts of witch trials. What she discovered was more complex. As she explores the lives of women accused of witchcraft, the author investigates the relations among their experiences, her own life, and contemporary American society, and she brings both a poet’s intuition and a philosopher’s insight to the text. For example, writing about Agnes Waterhouse, the first woman executed for witchcraft in England, Nuernberger quotes Foucault and mentions Frazier v. Cupp—in which the Supreme Court ruled that police can use deception when interviewing a suspect—as she considers the phenomenon of false confession. As Nuernberger shows, many of these women were often broken by torture and forced to confess to their “crimes,” a process that reflected Christian ideas about evil prevalent during their time rather than relics of a matriarchal prehistory. There are a few exceptions to this pattern, though, and the author ends with one of them. As the “Voodoo Queen” of New Orleans, Marie Laveau (1801-1881) has been transformed into tourist kitsch. There is no question that Laveau practiced rootwork and other spiritual modalities informed by African and Native American beliefs, and it would be wrong to discount the value of these practices among communities of color in the 19th-century South. However, as Nuernberger explains, Laveau also possessed a keen understanding of how to work within a legal system designed to make even free people of color live like slaves. As it turns out, her greatest magic may have been her mastery of property law.
Part memoir, part cultural criticism, entirely fascinating.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-946448-70-5
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Sarabande
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
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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