A chillingly drawn, expertly researched slice of grim Boston history.
A lively, evocative reinvigoration of Boston’s Gilded Age and the psychopathic young stalker who threatened public safety.
Previously fascinated by the literary constructs of Mary Shelley, Montillo (The Lady and Her Monsters, 2013, etc.) explores a dark period in 19th-century Boston when a notorious serial torturer attacked young boys. At the center of the author’s historical tapestry is Jesse Pomeroy, whose relentlessly abusive childhood may have inspired the many beating and torturing rages against youth in the Boston area in the 1870s when he was 14 years old. He became known as both the “Red Devil” and one of America’s youngest serial killers. With cinematic narration, Montillo retraces Pomeroy’s sadistic crime spree involving the vicious persecution of boys along the Chelsea, Massachusetts, waterfront and, later, in South Boston, after his mother relocated the family. Once his conviction and sentencing to reform school was completed, however, Pomeroy was released into his mother’s custody only to resume his crimes with murderous intensity. The author shares these bloody details with grisly accuracy through the deft interpretation of journals, newspaper articles, books and Pomeroy’s own autobiography. Though this morbid decade in Boston’s history could stand on its own, Montillo effectively incorporates divergent narrative threads profiling the lives of novelist Herman Melville and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Melville was fascinated by Pomeroy’s crimes and enlisted Holmes to explore the nature of madness and the psychological unraveling of Pomeroy who, in 1875, as the area still recovered from the Great Boston Fire, was handed a death sentence by hanging (after much official deliberation, the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment). Montillo creatively revives this tarnished New England era with the meticulous focus of a seasoned archivist and the graphic descriptive powers of a historical novelist.
A chillingly drawn, expertly researched slice of grim Boston history.Pub Date: March 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-227347-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
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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