A powerful, heartfelt and sometimes angry take on a great American city.
Musician and “Afropop Worldwide” radio producer Sublette delivers an intense and thoughtful “companion volume” to The World that Made New Orleans (2008).
Where that book was more an examination of the city’s cultural heritage, here the author skillfully synthesizes his personal history, his passion for music and an account of his fellowship as an independent scholar at Tulane, which concluded in the portentous summer of 2005. First, Sublette recalls his childhood in Natchitoches, which revealed to him the true horror of the Jim Crow South. The author contrasts this with the amazing African-American music culture that grew in opposition to this dehumanization. A true obsessive, he writes expertly of the intricate cross-pollination of blues, funk, soul and other genres. When he arrived for his fellowship, Sublette was made nervous by the racial tension, the prospect of violence and the possibility of a catastrophic hurricane, as evoked by the near-miss of Ivan following his arrival. He finds “The Big Easy” to be a “thoroughly ironic nickname” for this city, which in that pre-Katrina year was stressed and physically decrepit. Sublette has many experiences both good (music, food, local people) and bad (close calls with crime and violence, including the revelation that a notorious murder occurred in their rented house two years before he moved in). But even as he enjoys himself and conducts extensive research on the New Orleans music scene—creating numerous interesting, entertaining narrative tangents, like his examination of the city’s raunchy hip-hop culture—the author remains aware of the city’s fragility: “I knew I was seeing something imperiled.”
A powerful, heartfelt and sometimes angry take on a great American city.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-55652-824-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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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