A personal exploration of two centuries of family, community, and identity in the South.
A tribute to a larger-than-life father that sheds light on race, identity, and American history.
Mother and daughter Lauretta Malloy Noble and LeeAnét Noble honor the life of Lauretta’s father, Lawrence Edward Malloy Sr., a man who “embraced his Blackness as a badge of honor” and regaled his daughter, and most people he encountered, with stories of his family’s life in Laurinburg, North Carolina. After his death, the Nobles set out to learn more about the family and the town that loomed so large in Malloy’s life. Their work is at once personal and political: “Stories about towns like Laurinburg fill in the deliberate gaps in Black history. They live in between the lines and references, taking space solely in the hearts and minds of our elders.” The Malloy family experience is interwoven with aspects of U.S. history that many Americans would prefer to ignore, including the horrific violence perpetrated by the Red Shirts (a white supremacist organization) and systemic efforts to eliminate political and economic gains made during Reconstruction. The Nobles balance this history with accounts of the resilience of their family and other Laurinburg community members, “the people who triumphed amid chaos, who found ways to fight through generations by planting seeds that would continue to grow after they passed away. Now, more than ever before, we need to see a path to reinvent, to persevere, and to heal.” Such perseverance is apparent in the 1904 founding of the Laurinburg Institute, “the first Black boarding school in the United States” that “was responsible for the education of jazz musician Dizzy Gillespie, the families of director Spike Lee and actor Danny Glover,” among others. The historical context, which includes quotations from general interest websites, can be stilted, but the prose shines brightly in the more personal passages, particularly those recounting the sights and sounds of Malloy family gatherings.
A personal exploration of two centuries of family, community, and identity in the South.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780063352223
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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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