Relates a curious and complex life story but lacks the emotional depth to support the opening premise.
A debut memoir examines a web of family relationships and guilt over missed opportunities.
Burrell’s story begins when she and her adult son traveled from the U.S. to England to find her father on his deathbed. She felt “resentful, cheated” because her mother and sister had given little indication of her father’s condition. When he died, Burrell believed that she had “wasted fifty years with him,” that she had not been physically or emotionally present for her family for most of her life. The book unfolds from this premise of guilt and remembering. The author relates stories of her early childhood, being left alone for many hours while her parents worked. She became rebellious and couldn’t wait to “take control of my own life, leave home.” As a teen, she was accepted into the Royal Academy of Dance and left for London. In several chapters, Burrell returns to the present day, confronting her mother’s grief, her distant relationship with her sister, and preparations for her father’s funeral. She then picks up her own story: tales of travels to Syria, Egypt, and Italy as a nightclub dancer and how she raised her son, first with her mother’s help, then as a single parent. Burrell has enough vivid material for several books here: a lonely childhood, an exotic career, a difficult motherhood, and belated feelings of familial love and guilt. In addition, she includes a rich assortment of family photographs. Unfortunately, the work’s central theme and narrative thread are difficult to follow. Chapters on her travels are intriguing, including how Burrell befriended a “colorful and gregarious group of prostitutes” in Italy who provided cleaning, child care, and much needed companionship. But these stories ultimately reveal little about her family dynamics. Halfway through the book, the author sorts through boxes in her parents’ attic and discovers “a treasure trove of my dad’s life.” She realizes “the blunt fact” that she can’t ask her father about the items but is not prompted to delve much further into aspects of her parents’ lives that might shed light on her own.
Relates a curious and complex life story but lacks the emotional depth to support the opening premise.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 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
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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