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THE STORY OF THE LAKE

Anthologist and novelist Chester (Bitches Ride Alone, 1991, not reviewed, etc.) revisits the Midwest's gilded age—here, in a lavishly detailed but rushed saga of four families' intertwined lives from the turn of the century to the present. Set in fictional Nogowogotoc Lake, a sort of midwestern Newport, where vast shingled summer ``cottages'' surrounded by grand gardens lined the lakeshore, the story relates how a group of fabulously wealthy families woo and war over the years. There are the Ulrichs (beer), the Feltons and their Wells and Faithorne descendants (department stores), the Hewitts (tanneries), and the Schraegers (sausage). There are also numerous narrators, though the point of view leans to that of the Felton/Wells/Faithorne clan- -millionaires with a conscience: Matriarch Sarah Wells, who employs a retinue of gardeners to maintain her estate, leaves a generous bequest to the city of Milwaukee; son-in-law Leonard gives food and clothes to the needy; and daughters Isabelle and Helen work selflessly for good causes. The other families' women are almost as civic-minded; even the notorious and stylish Alicia Ulrich—who probably murdered her abusive father, though it could never be proven—prefers philanthropy to philandering as she grows older. The men, meanwhile, are less redeemable: Wally Schraeger, though married, regularly patronizes the local bordello; Colin Hewitt beats his wife, Dana; And Trumbull Rose, a Hewitt descendant, is a sadist and anti-Semitic bully. Along the way there are many violent deaths—Dana Hewitt's second husband, a Jew, is shot by the local fascists, Wally Schraeger dies in a plane crash, Colin is murdered by a terrified prostitute; torrid love affairs—Alicia and Wally, Colin and the housemaid, Dana and visiting artist Joshua; plus lots of period high living with menus, dress, and venues all fully described. And as usual with sagas where incident, not insight, is all, this one ends abruptly and unsatisfactorily. Certainly sweeping, certainly vivid, but terminally thin.

Pub Date: May 1, 1995

ISBN: 0-571-19861-9

Page Count: 382

Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995

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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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