by Susie Baxter ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 4, 2017
A light and sweet account of a rural upbringing.
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A woman remembers the sights, sounds, smells, and events of her Florida childhood in this memoir.
Baxter (Write Your Memoir: One Story at a Time, 2017, etc.) was born in the front room of a Florida “cracker” house, named for its open-air dividing hallway. An unexpected surprise for her parents after the births of her sisters Patsy and Anetha, the author was raised by a caring and loving clan. Like almost everyone else in the rural community, the family made its living growing tobacco, corn, and other staple crops; relied on trading and planting more than store-bought commodities for the day-to-day needs of its home; and didn’t have any next-door neighbors. Trees and fields separated the homestead from the next one. This isn’t to say that Baxter didn’t grow up in a close community—some of the most touching portions of the book describe her regular visits to her grandparents’ house down the road, where family members gathered their mail, baked holiday fruitcakes, and caught up on gossip. The author had an especially warm relationship with her great-grandfather Tip, a gentle soul who spent most of his time smoking on the front porch and singing to the children before dementia incapacitated him. In 75 chapters, broken into 6 segments describing important phases of the author’s childhood, Baxter uses anecdotes to provide a comprehensive, striking picture of her life, from her babysitter/dog Tommy to her father’s series of automobiles and her combative sibling relationships. Her pragmatic, whip-smart, and loving mother, Ethel, is captured with particular vibrancy (“Mama read stories to us and taught us how to do things, like make windmills with construction paper and a stick”). Baxter’s early years were not uneventful—a series of chapters covers the flood of 1948 while others examine the adjustment of attending school for the first time and her struggle to stop wetting the bed. But anyone looking for an account of trauma or seismic changes won’t find it here—the author provides a charming, sunny story of a childhood (complete with photos) that seems to have been a largely stable and happy one. This means that Baxter’s recollections of how her family lived day to day take center stage in chapters that are largely enjoyable thanks to her clear and vivid writing style.
A light and sweet account of a rural upbringing.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 417
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
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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