A family album so deftly and perfectly done—with not an instant of longueur—that not only do the people come alive, but so...
Another intelligent and companionable book from Rubin (An Honorable Estate, 2001, etc.), a family story “to try to understand who my father’s family were, and what they meant for and about me.”
Rubin’s grandfather Hymen, born in 1862, came to the US and settled (“probably in 1886”) in Charleston, South Carolina, where he and his wife produced a family of four boys and three girls, one of them the author’s father. Disaster struck, however, in 1902, when Hymen—a small merchandiser—suffered a heart attack and couldn’t work, leaving the family destitute and his wife the sole caregiver for seven children. There was no alternative but charity, including having the three younger boys sent to an orphanage where for a few years they could be safely provided for. Hymen lived, not well, nine more years, his wife ten, but the children—as each finished elementary school—went straight to work to bring in money. The family’s indigence and near collapse, though, Rubin emphasizes, was a frightening and humiliating thing that marked all the children and did as much as anything to shape their lives and characters. And what characters they were—intelligent, dutiful, hard-working, never self-pitying, all of them, one way or another, self-made. Only one sister married, and not well, though the lives of all were long and full. Two uncles became newspaper editors, and the third, also a journalist, was briefly successful as a playwright—and remained almost as fascinating to the young Rubin as he is to the reader. Rubin’s father was a successful electrical merchant, but illness, in the 1930s, sent him into a new career too interesting to be told about here.
A family album so deftly and perfectly done—with not an instant of longueur—that not only do the people come alive, but so do their time and place as Rubin again proves himself one of the finest chroniclers of the American past.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-8071-2808-2
Page Count: 140
Publisher: Louisiana State Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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