A simple but engaging Christian memoir.
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
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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