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SLEEPING IN TREES

TRUE TALES OF BOYHOOD ADVENTURE IN THE 1960S

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A debut memoir about growing up amid the mosquitoes, intense heat and boredom of suburban South Miami in the 1960s.
In this work, Brown tells the story of his pre-adolescent years. First, he introduces his “crew” of fellow mischievous young boys, whose nicknames included Dork, Lobster, Junkle, Butler, Cricket and Ding. In more than 50 short, sometimes-hilarious stories, he describes the occasionally dangerous pranks they committed in their neighborhood near Biscayne Bay. Each chapter describes one of their many acts of malfeasance, such as blowing up a mailbox with an oversized, homemade bomb; leaving broken Coca-Cola bottles under the brand new tires of Brown’s father’s Lincoln; and shooting at unsuspecting hermit crabs on the beach with high-powered slingshots. “[O]ur young lives were a twenty-four-hour assembly line of bumps, cuts and bruises,” Brown writes. But these acts, as he describes them, were never done with malice and were only the result of the severe boredom the boys endured as they rode their Sting-Ray bicycles around their neighborhood with little parental supervision. Other chapters tell of a stay at a disastrous summer camp in Tennessee where prunes were part of the required diet and of a time when the author took his friend’s father’s new Mercedes-Benz for a spin. Brown ends the book, however, on a somber note, as he returns to his old neighborhood after living with his family for a year in Seattle, only to find everything and everyone irrevocably changed. The most appealing aspect of this memoir is that it will surely rekindle some of its readers’ own memories of misguided childhood adventures. Brown keeps his short tales moving at a brisk pace, relating them in a casual narrative voice without contrived dialogue to slow the stories down. Throughout, his humorous chapter titles, such as “Monkey House,” “The Inconvenient Shrub,” and “The Lincoln Gets New Treads,” will likely keep readers guessing about the upcoming adventure.
An easygoing, funny and nostalgic debut.

Pub Date: July 31, 2014

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Amazon Digital Services

Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

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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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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