Candid prose anchors a gripping account of familial obligation and complicity.
A young woman grapples with her parents’ abusive actions in an activist’s debut memoir.
At age 10, Landgraf recalls, she overheard a conversation she did not fully understand: her mother, Elaine, chastising her father, Mont (an Oregon preacher and elementary school principal), for impregnating 15-year-old Michelle. Michelle and her two younger sisters, Katie and Elsie, were the adopted siblings of Landgraf and her baby sister, Carly. Instead of leaving her husband, Elaine punished Michelle, treating her, according to Landgraf, “like Cinderella. Clean this, wash that, set the table, iron clothes.” In addition to his predilection for young girls, the author writes, Mont harbored a fierce temper: when Landgraf performed a cheerleading routine during a school assembly, he violently dragged her from the stage and rebuked her for acting “loose.” These incidents invited unwanted scrutiny; eventually the family (minus Michelle, who was sent to live with different folks) moved to Ethiopia for missionary work. Though Landgraf––17 by then––loved living in Africa, the molestation (this time of Katie) and violence (the author recalls “being beaten with a poker until I could not walk”) continued. With every act of misconduct, Landgraf writes, life slid “back into our normal, without discussion or comment.” The book’s final third jumps ahead to Landgraf’s marriage and a brutal custody battle. Written in the present tense, this harrowing memoir conjures the immediacy of the horrors the author faced. At its best, her work lets simple, startling details speak for themselves, as when her husband commits a violent act and then “hands me my favorite comfort food, a hot caramel sundae, and begs forgiveness.” Landgraf is likewise unflinching when it comes to her own misdeeds––some of the book’s most moving passages concern her guilt about ignoring the abuse in her family. At times her writing lapses into sentimentality––“I bend over my legs and cry with the intensity of emotional pain”––but Landgraf maintains admirable control over her narrative until an abrupt ending that may leave some readers unsatisfied.
Candid prose anchors a gripping account of familial obligation and complicity.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Empower Press
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2016
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 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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