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THE BLACK PEARL NECKLACE

A fine snapshot of a stalwart individual.

A woman with terminal cancer chooses to live the end of her life to the fullest on an around-the-world cruise.

Jones (Letters from the Skeleton Coast, 2017) recalls events beginning in 2007 with his wife Joanne’s diagnosis of terminal cancer. Breast cancer, which she had battled for years previously, had metastasized throughout her body, giving her only a couple of years to live. After participating in an intensive drug trial that failed to produce results, she continued with traditional chemotherapy but to no avail. In late 2008, they made the difficult decision to discontinue treatment. He writes of Joanne: “The thought of spending her final days in a hospital bed was not an attractive option for her. With the countdown at about three months, she decided on her third wish—the final cruise.” At this point, the story turns its voice over to Joanne through a long series of emails, “unchanged and unedited,” which she wrote to family and friends while aboard the South Pacific cruise. These messages reveal her courageous and optimistic personality, ending with the words “There is a song with lyrics that is my mantra: ‘If you have the chance to sit it out or dance, I hope you dance.’ My dear friends—we have DANCED!!” This book first intrigues readers with its title, and then the prologue builds up expectations even more with the line “Well, let me tell you the amazing story of the black pearl necklace.” The tale quickly loses its momentum, however, especially since the drama of the necklace constitutes a very small percentage of the work, and the conflict and resolution behind it are rather anticlimactic. But the author excels at painting a splendid picture of Joanne and her selfless, upbeat character, something that will be particularly inspiring to those fighting cancer. Unfortunately, most of the text recounts simple reminiscences instead of employing salient details to purposefully contribute to plot and character development, elements that are vital in creating a riveting account. While close friends and family should adore this book, it will likely fail to engage a broader audience.

A fine snapshot of a stalwart individual.

Pub Date: March 1, 2017

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 100

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2017

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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 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

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

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

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