Heartwarming, yet sober and unsentimental.
New York Times “Online Shopper” Slatalla (Speeding the Net, 1998, etc.) interweaves her family’s biography with the story of a town and a way of life that are disappearing.
The author’s mother grew up in tiny, economically strapped Martin, Kentucky. The town’s great distinction was its penchant for flooding every year, like clockwork. Local buildings were permanently waterlogged, and Martin never shed the smell of dried mud: “It smells like ruin, like poverty, like defeat.” After decades of floods, the federal government stepped in, razing the town in 2004 and relocating its citizens to a planned community on nearby, higher ground. Slatalla, determined to preserve its history, has created a luminous ode to the quaint sign that proclaimed “MARTIN POP. 860,” the C&O Café, the local ghosts. Her examination of Martin’s participation in WWII provides an especially insightful look at rural America in the mid-20th century. Residents didn’t pay much attention to events in Europe. The local paper reported not on the Nazi invasion of Denmark, but on the Easter egg hunt to raise funds for Mrs. Greer’s third-grade class. But if American mobilization for war caught Martin unaware, families served with distinction: Young men signed up to fight, and those left at home aided the war effort by stepping up agricultural production. Slatalla also tells her ancestors’ stories: Great-grandmother Hesta was fierce and loving, great-grandfather Fred hardworking and careful. The central family drama revolves around grandmother Mary’s ill-conceived marriage to, divorce from and eventual remarriage to no-good Elmer, who is the most complex character here. Charming and flashy, he drank too much and chased skirts, but also showered his wife with heart-wrenching love letters. The anticlimactic epilogue, with its self-conscious echoes of the graveyard scene from Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, is the only disappointing chapter.
Heartwarming, yet sober and unsentimental.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2006
ISBN: 0-375-50905-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
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
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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