Filmmaker, composer, and financial analyst Van Peebles (Bold Money, 1986) relies more on movie-like fantasy than accuracy for his first novel—a historical fiction about the Black Panthers' early years: soon to be released as a movie by the author's son, Mario. This is truly the Hollywood version of Panther history- -characters are reduced to good guys and bad guys, their struggles into the stuff of action-adventure flicks; the imaginary, incendiary ending comes right from the brutish heroics of Bruce Willis or Eddie Murphy. In Van Peebles's fictional version, the Panthers began in Oakland as an earnest group of local activists protesting government indifference and police brutality. In a moment of lightbulb clarity, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale decide to arm themselves legally and confront the police wherever possible. It's the duo's macho willingness to face down the Man that purportedly wins them followers, from writer and ex-con Eldridge Cleaver to Judge, the Vietnam vet and Berkeley student whose radicalization is at the core of the novel. Overcoming his mother's fears, his own desire to make it in honkie society, and the local preacher's nonviolent strategies, Judge joins the ranks after he suspects the cops have killed his best friend. Because of his collegiate demeanor, he's soon enlisted to become a double agent by Huey himself, who knows the FBI has informers everywhere. When things collapse—when Newton and Seale are both in jail, and when Cleaver goes underground—the FBI and the Mob are free to begin their conspiracy to silence the ghetto by flooding the black neighborhoods with drugs. All the sleazy sides to Panther history- -their thuggery, their internal violence, the gangster end of Newton—are either ignored or explained as reflexive responses to police oppression. A less-than-candid narrative, with fatuous dialogue and hokey dramatics, manages to turn an important and complex story into Hollywood schlock. (First printing of 50,000; film rights to Gramercy Pictures)
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-56025-096-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
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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