A well-researched, if hagiographic, family history.
A nonfiction work chronicles a family’s history in Europe and America, from 18th-century Scotland to 20th-century West Virginia.
Tracing her lineage to 13th-century Scotland, Frazer recounts that her ancestors include Simon Fraser, the last Scottish lord to be executed for treason following 1745’s Jacobite rebellion. But the focus of this book lies in the descendants of William Frazer, who traveled to America in the 1700s and worked as an aide to the lieutenant governor of Colonial Virginia. The author’s family history features numerous illustrious individuals—veterans of George Washington’s Valley Forge campaign, sheriffs, small businessmen, and coal company presidents all make appearances. There is even a movie actor, who went by the stage name John Bradford and who starred alongside Will Rogers and other celebrities in mid-1930s Hollywood productions. Captivating stories of family lore are sprinkled throughout the book, including a grisly murder mystery featuring a jealous suitor of Harriet Frazer’s husband. Intersecting family history with American history, the work spotlights Gen. Stonewall Jackson, whose death at Mary Elizabeth Frazer Chandler’s plantation spawned an unintentional Confederate memorial still visited by Civil War buffs today. Indeed, plantations play a prominent role in the first half of the volume. While the author does not shy away from the “distressing” fact that these plantations relied on the forced labor of enslaved men and women, she presents only a superficial analysis of the African Americans whose lives were intimately tied to members of her family tree. Indeed, the book’s celebration of the Frazers may be a bit off-putting to skeptical readers. On the other hand, the author is a gifted genealogist. She offers not just a thoroughly documented family history, but also provides a model for would-be genealogists through her ample footnotes and general research advice delivered throughout the work. The volume’s occasionally stodgy yet rose-colored text is amplified by an abundance of photographs, portraits, maps, reprints of historical documents, and other visual aids. Appendix materials, such as a family tree and a state-by-state guide to cemeteries where Frazers are buried, may be particularly useful to future genealogists.
A well-researched, if hagiographic, family history.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-66-551740-9
Page Count: 244
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2021
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
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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