Yep, there’s gold in them thar hills—but lots of dross as well. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Freelance travel-writer Petro journeys through Appalachia and the Deep South to visit storytellers and record their tales, with uneven results.
The author divides her text into four “journeys,” automobile trips she took from her Rhode Island home into the South, “a famously talky place.” Between jaunts, she returns to New England for brief sojourns to do laundry and think. “First Journey” begins, appropriately enough, at the home of Joel Chandler Harris in Atlanta, where she hears a storyteller named Akbar Imhotep relate the tale of Brer Rabbit and the tar baby. Then it’s off to Florida (she sees the memorial to Rosewood, a black town razed by whites in 1922), then back to Georgia, where she meets Vickie Vedder, a storyteller who remains a presence principally through e-mails, several of which Petro reproduces at eye-glazing length. When not repeating stories, the writer expatiates on tornado warnings, kudzu, race, snake-handling (she includes a fabulously eerie story about rattlesnakes), motels, chigger bites, Gullah, and ghosts. A few tales appear without interruption, but others are paraphrased, interrupted, modified, or otherwise adumbrated by Petro. Some moments dazzle. She talks with a black woman for three hours before discovering the woman is blind; she tells the bizarre (and implausible) story of a woman born with a blackberry birthmark that darkens each year as the fruit ripens. Most dazzling of all is the intrepid author. She drives deep into the woods, visits the homes of the odd and the eerie, engages anyone and everyone in conversation about stories and storytelling, endeavors to elicit from the reluctant some words of wisdom. Alas, not all stories are created equal, and weirdness alone seldom suffices. More than a few of the tales are lifeless (they beg to be heard, not read), and some of Petro’s epiphanies never advance beyond banal.
Yep, there’s gold in them thar hills—but lots of dross as well. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-55970-612-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
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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