An often engaging and intimate remembrance.
A woman explores how her hair has shaped her identity in this memoir.
Eason (Man for Hire, 2015, etc.) is ordinarily a romance novelist, but in this book, she tells of her longtime affinity for the romance of beautiful, billowing hair. For many women, the concept of beauty is inextricably bound up with the idea of long, luxurious locks. The African-American author grew up with her mother, two older half sisters, and grandmother in 1980s Detroit. As a young girl, she had a head of “kinky” hair that simply would not fall at a vertical angle, and she became obsessed with the idea of “good” hair, which she found difficult to define. Painful braiding and at-home hair-relaxing kits, which burned her scalp and caused strands of her hair to break off, plagued her adolescence. As Eason’s hair-care methods became more sophisticated, her search for the perfect style—the “hairstyle that expressed who I was in that moment”—carried into her adult life, through different careers and boyfriends, from her time serving in the military overseas to her fresh start pursuing an acting career in New York City. But eventually, Eason was forced to ask herself, “Why?” When the communal pursuit of perfect hair started to affect the physical and emotional health of herself and those around her, Eason had to come to terms with her preoccupation. The first half of this book, covering the author’s childhood and early teenage years, brilliantly and colorfully combines her life story with her relationship to her hair, examining the intricacies and cultural context of the latter while never sacrificing the exciting storytelling elements of the former. Readers get to know the vile young boys at her elementary school, the heartbreaking and infuriating personality quirks of her mother and grandmother, and the distinct personalities of her sisters. As the memoir progresses into Eason’s adulthood, however, it loses this breadth of characters. Nonetheless, Eason’s prose remains impeccable and charming—quaint and quick but never wandering into whimsical territory—and this refreshing voice carries the book to its conclusion with momentum.
An often engaging and intimate remembrance.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2017
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 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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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