A fast-paced story of a man at the center of turbulence and paranoia.
The story of an African-American photographer who spent 18 years feeding information to the FBI.
Over a 60-year career, Ernest Withers (1922-2007) produced more than 1 million photographs chronicling black life in the South. A “pivotal” contributor to the black press, he seemed an unlikely man to serve as an FBI informant. His powerful images of Martin Luther King Jr., of Emmett Till’s uncle at the trial of his nephew’s killers, and of civil rights and anti-war protests appeared to support the activities and individuals he documented. But as Perrusquia (co-author: The Blood of Innocents: The True Story of Multiple Murders in West Memphis, Arkansas, 2000) argues persuasively, from 1958 to 1976, Withers led a “double life.” A trusted member of the Memphis black community, he was trusted as well by FBI agent William Lawrence, who filled dossiers with photographs and intelligence Withers passed on. As he began his research, the author, an investigative reporter for the Memphis Commercial Appeal, faced opposition from the FBI as well as Withers’ family, who sued to quash the “distorted portrait” that they feared would emerge. Filing requests under the Freedom of Information Act, the author was met with repeated denials; after agreeing to mediation, the newspaper eventually received hundreds of pages, which Perrusquia has mined fruitfully, along with archival material and scores of interview transcripts. “An Army veteran with conservative views that aligned with most of Middle America when it came to Vietnam and the cold war,” Withers seemed as eager as Lawrence to rout communists from the civil rights and peace movements. Close to King and his circle, he reported to the FBI when King met with Black Power militants. When he covered anti-war demonstrations, protestors welcomed him as a sympathizer, but the FBI used his photographs to identify individuals they had under surveillance. Perrusquia is uncertain about Withers’ motivation—“money, patriotism” or “his long ambition to be a cop”—and he sees him, as do many others, as a hero who publicized the realities of activist movements.
A fast-paced story of a man at the center of turbulence and paranoia.Pub Date: March 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61219-341-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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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