Well-documented, well-written, and endlessly fascinating debut. (b&w photos throughout, not seen)
A freelance journalist unearths new information about an unsolved 1946 quadruple murder.
While working at the University of Georgia student newspaper in 1997, Wexler read a historical account of the shotgun lynching of two black men and two black women in Moore's Ford, Georgia. After stabbing his 29-year-old white landlord, Barnette Hester, 24-year-old African-American Roger Malcom ended up in the local jail. Despite rumblings of a lynching by inflamed whites, Malcom survived the jail stay, returning to the community on bond to await trial when it became clear Hester would survive the seemingly fatal wound. His release re-ignited the racists. Rumors flew that Malcom had been marked for death, and on July 25, 1946, it came—not only to Malcom but also to his wife Dorothy and another young black couple, George and Mae Dorsey. Although state and federal authorities conducted investigations, with President Truman pushing for arrests, the case remained officially unsolved. Wexler wondered whether further examination of the disturbing incident would help her understand more contemporary racial conflicts such as those flowing from the O.J. Simpson murder trial and the altercation involving police and Rodney King. She traveled to Walton and Oconee counties in rural Georgia, where she interviewed more than a hundred people who lived through the 1946 ugliness or possessed secondhand information worth pursuing. She read microfilm. She unearthed documents from investigative agencies. She learned that the case had many truths, some emanating from the white sector of the population, some from the black sector, and some intermingling the accounts tinged by the race of the teller. After years of digging, Wexler concludes that she will never know for sure who killed the Malcoms and the Dorseys, but she believes the story has deep resonances with today’s troubled race relations.
Well-documented, well-written, and endlessly fascinating debut. (b&w photos throughout, not seen)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-684-86816-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
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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