Bright and readable, with plenty of how-to for hobbyists.
New York Times contributor Watman (Race Day, 2005) offers a diverting account of moonshine, or white lightning, interspersed with descriptions of his frustrating but ultimately successful efforts to make liquor at home.
Moonshining—illegally distilling liquor—began during the Civil War, when the federal government imposed heavy liquor taxes. While dispelling the myth of the wild-looking, straw-chewing “moonshine man”—most distillers were small farmers who turned excess yields of corn and apples into alcohol—the author finds much color in the still-ongoing battle between moonshiners and “revenuers.” He interviews moonshiners, goes on a drive-along with government agents and visits distilleries and courtrooms to follow hooch’s growth from a sideline for farmers into today’s well-organized, multimillion-dollar business with distilleries producing thousands of gallons weekly. Much of the illegal business is still centered in the South, writes the author, with its acknowledged hub in Franklin County, Va., where the historical society runs a “Moonshine Express” bus tour. Moonshine is now consumed for a low-priced high mainly by African-Americans in unlicensed bars (shot houses or nip joints) in run-down sections of Northern cities. The author recounts famous trials of moonshiners, including the St. Louis whiskey ring that defrauded the U.S. government of $1.5 million annually from 1873 to ’75 and the Virginia distillers convicted in 1935 for conspiring with agents who tipped them off before raids. Watman also chronicles the 2000 crackdown by Operation Lightning Strike—a federal-state effort—on a major Rocky Mount, Va., ring that supplied tons of sugar and bottles to moonshiners. Along the way the author introduces such characters as celebrated moonshiner Popcorn Sutton, author of Me and My Likker; moonshiner-turned-NASCAR driver Junior Johnson; and a 50-year-old black man and former crackhead named Skillet, who reminisces about the good old days in nip joints: “People’d fight and shit, cut each other, hell.”
Bright and readable, with plenty of how-to for hobbyists.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-7178-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2009
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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