This book is more of a monochromatic mural than a multicolored tapestry, but it still captures the effects of social change...
Turk travels the back roads of 36 states in search of “the living story of rural America.”
The author, a former educational leadership professor at Wichita State University, follows in the footsteps of such luminaries as Charles Kuralt and William Least Heat-Moon in this sometimes-engaging, if repetitive, account of 16 months of travels around the back roads of America with Mo, his golden retriever. He comes from a farming family, and he set out to chronicle “the living story of rural America” by interviewing people he encountered on the road. “If our family history is connected by stories,” then the “history of rural America is linked by the stories of their residents,” he writes. Rural America, of course, has been undergoing profound social and economic change, as Turk notes—“Today, three out four rural counties no longer depend on agriculture as their primary economic base”—and his stories of more than 100 people provide a window into that transformation. “American Falls is dying off,” lamented a resident of that small, southeast Idaho town, while an interviewee in Osage, Missouri, said that the only businesses left in town were mostly “antique stores....We don’t have anything anymore.” In Buena Vista, Virginia, an old-timer said that the loss of businesses and other changes “have made it difficult to promote our legacy as an old town of the South.” Even so, Turk doesn’t excessively dwell on the negative, as he also extols the community spirit of small-town America and uncovers such success stories as Las Vegas, New Mexico, a once “semi-segregated” community where a Hispanic resident told him, “I never thought forty years ago [that] an Anglo would be asking me my opinion on anything.” He also enlivens the text with the imaginary musings of his dog, Mo, such as, “I am so bored that I do not even want to ask for a dawg bone.” Readers, though, may experience a similar emotion, as the author doesn’t have the prose skills to really bring characters he meets to life, resulting in an often monotonous portrait of rural America. However, he has, at the very least, provided a worthwhile contribution to making that part of America “recognizable to future generations.”
This book is more of a monochromatic mural than a multicolored tapestry, but it still captures the effects of social change on rural communities.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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