Superior scholarship provides a sturdy foundation for a hefty narrative edifice that sometimes groans with the weight of...
Powell (American Civilization/Tulane Univ.; Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke’s Louisiana, 2000, etc.) returns with a dense, complex history of a dense, complex settlement.
The author knows well the geographical and geopolitical history of the city where he teaches, and the complexity of this story would daunt a faint-hearted historian—which Powell manifestly is not. He dives confidently into the murky bayou of the region’s story, and what a tangled tale he emerges to tell. The author begins with the explorers, provides geological history of the region and of the serpentine, intractable Mississippi River. Powell then narrates the stories of the French, Spanish, African slaves and British—all of whom settled, collided, mingled, married, reproduced and competed. The European colonial powers, especially France, attempted to impose on the area—a most unlikely spot for a settlement, as Powell continually reminds us—some sort of design, but the terrain, the weather and the unique human mixture imposed their own fluid economy and culture. After taking over, Spain found it more profitable to practice a more relaxed reign, especially with slaves, who enjoyed more freedom of movement, economic clout and opportunities for manumission than they did with the French, and than they would with the Americans. The author begins with initial settlements and ends with the War of 1812. Along the way he tells stories—sometimes too densely for general readers—of the well-known (John Law) and little known (an ineffectual Spanish governor, Don Antonio de Ulloa) and should-be-known (the organizers of New Orleans’ capable black militia). Powell is brilliant at elucidating the city’s intricate racial politics.
Superior scholarship provides a sturdy foundation for a hefty narrative edifice that sometimes groans with the weight of detail.Pub Date: March 30, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-674-05987-0
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2012
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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