Though a tiny footnote in a violent time and place, McCracken’s story holds some small interest to true-crime buffs.
Slowly unfolding tale of death by poison in early-20th-century Hungary.
In Hungarian farm country, writes longtime journalist McCracken, spring is the time of year when farmers pull muscles, suffer accidents, and wear themselves to the bone. In a village called Nagyrév, an herbalist and midwife known as Auntie Suzy administered potions to deal with everything from diarrhea to heart palpitations. She also kept a stock of arsenic, about which she bragged to a local member of the gentry, “There is enough in here to kill one hundred men. No doctor could ever detect it.” When people, mostly very young children and middle-aged men, began to die, it helped that Auntie Suzy was the de facto doctor and coroner, ascribing death not to her medicine but to consumption and other maladies. When suspicion finally landed on her, she defiantly called herself not a murderer but “an angel maker” and then “spilled forth what was to her not a confession, but a manifesto on the role of a midwife.” Meanwhile, other women divined that poisoning was a good way to get rid of their enemies, and between 1914 and 1929, authorities believed, hundreds of victims died in Nagyrév. Some suspects walked, others swung at the end of a rope, others committed suicide. The story is not unknown, but neither has it been stretched out to this length—and yet it’s not quite complete. McCracken might have done more to tease out themes of class, racism, and sexism, and often the narrative loses dramatic tension, feeling more like a police report than a thriller. Where there is action, it is often weighted with unnecessary observations: “She sank her spoon into the meaty soup. She knew she would nap better after a hearty meal.” A judicious trimming and attention to such matters would have helped the text.
Though a tiny footnote in a violent time and place, McCracken’s story holds some small interest to true-crime buffs.Pub Date: March 14, 2023
ISBN: 9780063275034
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | WORLD
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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