Gripping.
Journalist Worrall’s dynamic debut profiles master forger Mark Hofmann, who fabricated an unpublished Emily Dickinson poem and gulled the highest reaches of the Mormon church.
Hofmann's gift for handwriting mimicry—coupled with his powers of concentration—allowed the unassuming Salt Lake City man to produce extraordinarily convincing literary fakes, many of which surfaced in the early 1980s. Tracing Hofmann's career, Worrall begins with one of his most startling feats, the creation of a Dickinson poem from whole cloth. Though the book’s title puts the poet on equal footing with Hofmann (who eventually murdered two people in an attempt to put off creditors), it is really the forger's story. Hofmann began his fakery in high school, when he counterfeited a coin; from there, a combination of cynicism, creativity, and greed led him to “discover” a series of ever more fantastic historical documents perfectly pitched to appeal to the Mormon hierarchy. All seem to have been created in an effort to make church founders look ridiculous; the most well-known is the “salamander letter,” which has Joseph Smith receiving wisdom from an angry, talking amphibian. Although this ground has been traveled before in at least one lengthy work dedicated only to the Mormon forgeries (The Mormon Murders, by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith), Worrall expands the scope, including a detailed portrait of Dickinson's life and work, the history of forgery, and examinations of Hofmann's other fakes, including a phony version of “Oath of a Freeman,” the first document printed in colonial America. The author also digs deep into Sotheby's auction house, vendor of the false Dickinson, reporting on lawmen and authorities in the scholarly community who complain that their warnings of forgeries to Sotheby's regularly go unheeded.
Gripping.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-525-94596-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
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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