An esoteric book that may enlighten devotees of Fredericksburg geography and the trees that symbolize the man.
A new look at George Washington, “focusing on his poorly documented and heavily mythologized childhood years.”
There is little Levy (History/Univ. of South Florida; Where the Cherry Tree Grew: The Story of Ferry Farm, George Washington’s Boyhood Home, 2013, etc.) could possibly have missed about Ferry Farm—the area across from Fredericksburg where Washington lived from age 6 to his early 20s—in his broad reading, writing, lectures, and participation in its archaeology digs. Washington’s father died in 1743, eliminating George’s chance to be educated in England. The author examines the cherry tree incident, a myth first proffered by preacher Mason Locke Weems. Weems took the opportunity of Washington’s death to quickly come out with a biography that sold well, especially in subsequent printings as he added more and more “incidents” attributable to local residents. Levy explains how Weems provided legitimacy to his work. His statement that the home at Ferry Farm was run-down and dilapidated helped him to establish the deeply rooted picture of Washington as a self-made man. His book was not authoritative or the best researched, but it is certainly the most enduring. It established a meaning to the land itself as he created a new history genre rife with morals, anecdotes, patriotic drivel, and general fabulism. He was way ahead of his time in marketing his book until its final printing in 1809. There is little of Washington’s childhood that is verifiable: his ancestry, the death of his father, that he was locally schooled, his near career at sea, and his life in different homes. This is a deep study of a history that can’t be proven. Levy can be wordy and repetitive, but many readers will admire the tenacity with which he searched for answers that just aren’t there.
An esoteric book that may enlighten devotees of Fredericksburg geography and the trees that symbolize the man.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-940425-90-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: West Virginia Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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 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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