Sympathetic to the protagonists’ plight, Sackville-West hones a well-crafted narrative of intrigue, betrayal and greed.
An aristocratic family’s scandalous past.
Sackville-West (Inheritance, 2010, etc.) now lives at Knole, a “stately home” of 365 rooms, 52 staircases and seven courtyards on a vast tract in Kent, England. The property, in his family for 400 years, looms darkly in this sad, sordid family saga, more King Lear than Downton Abbey. The story begins in 1852, when Lord Lionel Sackville-West met Josefa Duran, a Spanish dancer known as Pepita; they embarked on an affair that lasted 20 years and produced five children. To avoid embarrassment to himself and Pepita, Lionel occasionally referred to Pepita as his wife, although she was already married, estranged from her Spanish husband. Lionel installed them in the south of France, visited rarely and struggled to support them. After Pepita died in 1871, he arranged for the children’s care, sending money when he had it. As the fifth son of the fifth Earl De La Warr, Lionel had entered the diplomatic service, a respectable but not remunerative career. His brothers stood to inherit considerably from their father; Lionel did not. But in 1888, a fluke of circumstances and deaths found Lionel the master of Knole. Immediately, the children who had been affectionate in their youth grew rancorous, intent on proving their legitimacy and right to the Sackville name and fortune. Victoria, the eldest daughter, who served as Lionel’s hostess and protector, became the focus of their wrath, and the author gleans much evidence from her diaries and letters and from a biography of Pepita by Victoria’s literary daughter, Vita. Protracted lawsuits eventually found in Lionel’s favor; one son eked out a living in Africa; another killed himself; a daughter died in penury. Victoria, replaced by her husband’s mistress, was eventually ousted from Knole.
Sympathetic to the protagonists’ plight, Sackville-West hones a well-crafted narrative of intrigue, betrayal and greed.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63286-043-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
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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