Bittersweet end-of-innocence family drama.
A tender, plaintive memoir about the impact of a beloved father's demise on a blue-collar Irish Catholic family.
Novelist Wood (Any Bitter Thing, 2005, etc.) grew up in a paper-mill town in Maine where she was one of many “children of well-paid laborers” who were living the American Dream. But everything changed in April 1963 when her father, upon whom the burden of maintaining that dream rested, died at the age of 57. Without his sure and steady presence, the 9-year-old Wood experienced “a profound dislocation, a feeling like slipping on the shifting surface of my allotted scrap of God's earth.” The sense of loss was as disorienting for her as it was for her siblings, who now measured their days by how long it had been since they had last seen their father alive. But the Wood children ultimately fared better than Mumma, their housewife mother, and Father Bob, their priest uncle. Mumma haunted her family's home “like a spirit from the ghost stories she and Dad love to tell” and spent her days sleeping in her children's beds. Father Bob succumbed to a crippling depression that sent him to the hospital. Just as the family began putting their lives back together again, another beloved Irish patriarch, John F. Kennedy, also died. Now all Americans knew the kind of loss that had become a fact of life for the Wood family. The author provides a genuinely compelling depiction of family grief, but the Kennedy tragedy functions more as an interesting narrative sidebar than as a major part of the storyline.
Bittersweet end-of-innocence family drama.Pub Date: July 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-547-63014-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
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 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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