A hilarious, beauteous collection of immigrant tales.
Macala recounts the tall tales of his multinational Eastern European family.
Macala grew up in a storytelling family. Stories from the Old Country, stories of the passage over, stories of learning to live in America. They were told in Slovak, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian, Yiddish, Ukrainian, French, and (understandably) broken English. In “Remainders,” Macala explains the relative prestige of math, language, and writing in the life of an immigrant: “Who could tell that my father had once been a member of a drunken peasant mob? And while his math skills were embarrassing to my mother, she was proud that her husband could write his name.” In “My Brother Juri,” he tells of his brother, a high school football and track star who claimed to have once raced against Jesse Owens, who would greet people by saying, “Shake the hand that shook the hand of the guy that shamed Adolf Hitler.” There are earnest stories as well: in “Anton, Warsaw Lawyer,” Macala describes meeting with his openly gay cousin in London and considers how much his family has evolved emotionally as well as culturally. Macala is a natural storyteller, and though he professes to be transcribing these tales from an oral family history, the precision of his language and the sharpness of detail reveal an impressive relationship with the written word. The stories are occasionally heartbreaking; more often they are irreverent, absurd, and legitimately laugh-inducing. The greatest strength of these stories, however, is the way they preserve the immigrant experience—not just one, but many, from many different places, migrating at different times and under different circumstances. The particular color of each experience is engrossing and wonderful, yet the commonality of the collective experience, which rises to the surface of the book, is quite profound. Without any of the mawkishness that can seep into the story of a family’s landing, Macala provides true insight into the ways people move and how their assimilation (or lack thereof) shapes future generations in odd and edifying ways.
A hilarious, beauteous collection of immigrant tales.Pub Date: April 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-1495905391
Page Count: 264
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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
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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