by Philip Garrison ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1991
The best of these 15 essays by Garrison (English/Central Washington State Univ.), written mostly in the present tense and dealing often with experiences in Mexico or the American Northwest, offer the rewards of superb short fiction—a juxtaposition of emotional and personal significance with strongly evoked settings. ``We practice two kinds of hearing,'' Garrison writes in ``The Tour Guide,'' which combines personal instances with reflections on the nature of narrative. ``At any moment, we may be listening to a story, or we may be listening through it to the suggestions that lie beyond it.'' That sort of layering effect is Garrison's method. In ``Adaptations,'' for instance, he offers pioneer tales, instances of local color (sagebrush, quails, coyotes, etc.), and an aesthetic: ``A story is a series of adaptations. The setting yields the characters that help, scene by scene, reveal the setting....'' While those two pieces are examples of a successful yoking of metafiction and exposition, others avoid the theorizing but take advantage of the aesthetic: ``Independence Day,'' set in Mexico, contrasts subtropical culture to the horrendous death of Garrison's father from cancer, so that the mixture provides a kind of healing (``this side of the border blends the grotesque and the graceful, the elegant and the disgusting''). Garrison is also eclectic: ``Finding Our Lives'' is about a peyote pilgrimage he undertook with the Huichol Indians of Mexico; ``Where Pigs Can See the Wind'' reflects on folk belief, especially in Illinois (where Garrison grew up); and ``Two Love Scenes in Homer'' contrasts honest Achilles and wily Odysseus, symbolizing ``conflict of the literal and the figurative.'' By turns thoughtful and evocative, these essays map out some of the ways in which Northwest nature and Mexican culture comment upon or reflect human nature and the author's mind.
Pub Date: July 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-8203-1312-2
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1991
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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