A well-sourced but hagiographic sports biography.
Stalions (A Rough Way to Ride Between Earth and Sky, 2003) offers an updated biography of star American ski jumper Casper Oimoen.
The pride of Minot, North Dakota (where a statue of him now stands), Casper Oimoen was a three-time national ski-jumping champion and two-time captain of the U.S. Olympic ski team. He was also Stalions’ father, and she seeks to immortalize him in this account of his accomplishments on and off the slope. Oimoen was a Norwegian immigrant who arrived in the United States in 1923 at the age of 17. He was initially registered at Ellis Island under the name “Simoen,” as the letter “S” is a common misrepresentation of the Norwegian letter “Ø.” This kept him from qualifying to represent the United States in the 1928 Winter Olympics, as officials were unable to obtain his immigration papers—which had been filed under “S.” Upon first arriving in eastern North Dakota, Casper was upset to notice the flatness of the terrain—Stalion imagines her father thinking, “Where are the hillocks for ski jumping?”—but he was later reassured by the slopes of Minot to the west. Using photos, letters, and Stallions’ own childhood journals, the author pieces together Oimoen’s career from apprentice brick mason to Olympian. She also illuminates his family life, which features both tragic loss and the joys of children and grandchildren. Stallions’ prose is simple but capable, and she effectively captures many dramatic moments from her parent’s life, such as those of the 1936 Winter Olympics in Nazi Germany. It is a brief work—fewer than 150 pages—and much of that page count is given over to black-and-white photographs, including some striking action shots of Oimoen mid-jump. The work is more of a loving tribute to the author’s father than it is a serious sports biography, and, as such, it’s unlikely to find a wide audience. However, readers who are interested in the early days of American skiing or the history of the Norwegian community of the Upper Midwest may enjoy it.
A well-sourced but hagiographic sports biography.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
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
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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