Ranges from delights to self-indulgent snores.
Self-consciously modeled after state guides sponsored by the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s, this ambitious effort features a terrific roster of writers and arrives just in time for the November elections.
Best here are the immigrant stories: Mohammed Naseehu Ali’s reflections on his introduction to America’s generosity as a Ghanaian high-school student at a Michigan arts academy; Ha Jin’s account of his early years developing as a writer in Georgia; Jhumpa Lahiri’s informative memoir about growing up in Rhode Island. Jack Hitt writes hilariously of the South Carolina temperament, made up of “easy rage, china-shop recklessness and merry eccentricity”—and he’s from the genteel outpost of Charleston. Jonathan Franzen invents a lame interview with a couple of New York State lackeys eager to give him the official scoop, while Lydia Millet offers an openly hostile view of Arizona and the wasteful populace that doesn’t value it. But many writers display genuine love for their state, alongside satisfactory morsels of truth, as in Ann Patchett’s monologue on changes she’s witnessed over the years in Tennessee, Alison Bechdel’s charming cartoon about her life in Vermont, William T. Vollmann’s expression of enduring faith in California and Philip Connors’s riff on the phenomenon of the “Minnesota Nice.” Others—seemingly all New Yorkers—briefly pass through their assigned state on vacation: Saïd Sayrafiezadeh in South Dakota, David Rakoff in Utah and Will Blythe in New Hampshire, whose “paradoxical pride in one’s modesty” he likens to that of the natives in his natal North Carolina. Susan Orlean puts to bed the myths about Ohio, and Andrea Lee, raised in Philadelphia, expresses her conflicted feelings about the utopian ideals of her birth state. Like most anthologies, it’s uneven, and individual essays are somewhat narrow in focus. But Paris Review deputy editor Weiland and McSweeney’s editor at large Wilsey (co-editors: The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup, 2006, etc.) keep it positive and heartfelt.
Ranges from delights to self-indulgent snores.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-147090-5
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
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 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
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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