Wrenching stories of suffering, loss, endurance, humility and gratitude.
Former investigative reporter Gup (Journalism/Emerson Coll.; Nation of Secrets: The Threat to Democracy and the American Way of Life, 2007, etc.) unravels the knotty but fascinating story of an anonymous act of benevolence performed in an Ohio town imploding under the pressure of the Great Depression.
In 2008, the author received an unlikely treasure from his elderly mother: an old suitcase that once belonged to his grandfather. Inside, Gup discovered a cache of letters and cancelled checks, all involving a man named B. Virdot, who, during Christmas 1933, placed a notice in the Canton Repository announcing that he would present 75 families with $10 each—a considerable sum in 1930s America—if they explained their need. So many applied that Virdot altered the amount to $5 and helped 150 families. Gup quickly realized that his own grandfather was B. Virdot—a name fashioned from the names of his daughters. During the next couple years, the author sought every remaining thread of this compelling tale. He visited surviving family members, found the lone surviving letter writer, visited libraries and cemeteries and historical societies, interviewed more than 500 people, scoured the Internet and pursued another story—that of his grandfather. Known as “Sam Stone,” owner of a clothing store in Canton, he was actually a Romanian Jewish immigrant named Sam Finkelstein who lied for decades about his biography. Gup artfully weaves together the stories of the recipients (and their descendants) and the story of his grandfather, gradually revealing as much as he was able to discover about him. At age 93, Stone died in Florida in a freak car accident on a drawbridge and took to the grave the story of “B. Virdot.” Only occasionally does the author veer into the maudlin and predictable.
Wrenching stories of suffering, loss, endurance, humility and gratitude.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-59420-270-4
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2010
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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