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AMERICAN CASTLE

ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF MAR-A-LAGO

A well-told story that’s full of surprises, its storied subject generating headlines for a century.

A history of a grand mansion and its numerous occupants.

In the 1920s, writes Shanklin, “across the Sunshine State, the steamy lure of tropical weather, flour-colored beaches, queen palms, orange trees, cheap land, and more cheap land drew hundreds of speculators.” One structure sat on 17 acres behind a low rise that served as a buffer against the region’s frequent hurricanes. That was an important consideration: In 1928, a hurricane “levied the ultimate regressive tax on its victims.” Though the white citizens living in the mansions did fine, hundreds of Black workers brought in to build and maintain the new estates drowned and were either buried in mass graves or burned. Mar-a-Lago was relatively unscathed, though its owner, Marjorie Merriweather Post, complained that the winds had uprooted a number of palm trees. The property wasn’t cheap, but Post wasn’t concerned. The heiress to a fortune built on cereal, she had even more money at her disposal thanks to her marriage to financier E.F. Hutton. So wealthy were they that they went on a 10-week Caribbean cruise while the world staggered through the worst days of the Great Depression. Post eventually turned the keys over to the National Park Service under the aegis of Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, but NPS never had an adequate budget for the place. As such, it was returned to the Post Foundation in 1980 and, in 1986, sold to Donald Trump, who inflated its value and suckered Chase Manhattan Bank into floating 99.97% financing. When creditors suddenly called in $2 billion in notes, Trump developed it into a golf club with a historic easement that “could unlock a trove of tax breaks for Mar-a-Lago’s owner.” In a grifters’ paradise, that seems fitting, though doubtless Post, a major donor to the Democratic Party, wouldn’t be pleased with the current occupants.

A well-told story that’s full of surprises, its storied subject generating headlines for a century.

Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023

ISBN: 9781635768961

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Diversion Books

Review Posted Online: June 13, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Awards & Accolades

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  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2017


  • New York Times Bestseller


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  • National Book Award Finalist

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 Yorker staff 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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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