Still, there’s not much drama in this tale, for all the chest-beating involved. One supposes that the retiring Miss...
In which mustachioed brigands, having stolen away a virtuous American schoolmarm, set off a diplomatic incident that threatens to bring Teddy Roosevelt’s warships to the gates of the Dardanelles.
In 1901, writes Carpenter (Mob Girl, 1992), the missionary schoolteacher Ellen Stone was kidnapped “by a band of unidentified revolutionaries” in the Balkan hinterlands of the Ottoman Empire. Stone had done nothing in particular to bring the event about; the Macedonian nationalists who took her, by Carpenter’s account, had been casting about for a target for quite some time, having considered but then ruled out stealing away a six-year-old Bulgarian prince and assorted other local dignitaries. But Americans, the revolutionaries reasoned, had cash, and the ransom would enable them to buy plenty of guns to turn on their Turkish oppressors. The price for her freedom and that of her fellow missionary Katerina Tsilka, they told Stone, would be 25,000 lira, or $110,000—and “if it is not paid,” they warned, “there will be a bullet for you and a bullet for her.” Long episodes of diplomatic wrangling and haggling, to say nothing of bullying and blustering from the Roosevelt White House, follow, until Stone is finally allowed to go free, slipping into Austria and obscurity. Carpenter does a competent enough job of dusting off this little-remembered tale and of filling in the gaps in the crumbled newsprint, and in her hands the villainous Macedonian rebels of the headlines turn out to have had a point, if not much strategic sense. She gives a fair account, too, of the complex politics of the Balkans, through which an evidently simple kidnapping becomes a matter of honor, revenge, and interethnic rivalry.
Still, there’s not much drama in this tale, for all the chest-beating involved. One supposes that the retiring Miss Stone—who gently remarked that her kidnappers “had worked hard for their booty”—would be embarrassed by all the attention.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-0055-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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 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
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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