by Sonya Thompson ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 7, 2017
A simple but engaging Christian memoir.
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A series of gentle reminiscences about the author’s childhood and early adulthood.
Thompson’s slim debut autobiography takes the form of a series of quick sketches of different moments in her life. She begins with various childhood adventures that she had as part of a military family, which she embellishes with novelistic touches of dialogue, imbuing them with warmth and immediacy. For instance, she tells of playing with dolls in North Carolina while news of the Vietnam War unfolded on television or of a stray cat, Peanuts, that she and her sister found, then lost, then found again. She enlivens these early reminiscences with relatable anecdotes and quips; surely she wasn’t the only young person to think “wall-to-wall carpet” meant that there was carpet on the walls, for example. She also very naturally weaves her personal Christian faith into these vignettes, with none of the heavy-handedness that often characterizes faith-anchored memoirs; as a result, nonreligious readers will find it easy to enjoy. Later chapters move forward to the author’s time at the University of Georgia and some of her experiences with Campus Crusade for Christ, including specific details about living a religious life on a bustling college campus. She also offers stories about adjusting to her commission in the U.S. Army Reserve: “Making new friends was easy,” she writes, “there is nothing like the camaraderie in the military.” Her tales of life as an Army medical services officer are among the most engaging in the book: “The air circulating underneath our fatigues made us all look like inflatable dolls,” she jokes at one point, when her group is onboard a helicopter. Thompson alternates between job stories and faith stories with easy, relaxed skill, which makes both aspects feel mutually reinforcing; the familiar, quotidian rituals of bowling leagues and driving lessons, for example, not only glow with happy memories, but also with lessons of faith.
A simple but engaging Christian memoir.Pub Date: June 7, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 78
Publisher: River of Life Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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