by Terry C. Johnston ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1995
Johnston (Winter Rain, 1993, etc.) returns to Titus Bassthe mountain man protagonist of the trilogy Carry the Wind, Borderlords, and One-Eyed Dreamin this prequel about Bass's coming of age in frontier America. The story opens in Boone County, Kentucky, with a restless adolescent Titus discovering the pleasures of sex and the pain of life's decisions. Enamored of neighbor girl Amy, Titus is torn between the prospect of domestic happiness and the tales of adventure he hears from westbound ramblers. There is never a doubt which life will finally be victorious over the young, self-taught hunter, but almost a fifth of the novel passes before Titus decides to abandon hearth and homeand Amyfor the wiles of the lower Mississippi River valley, ultimately visiting St. Louis and the virgin wilderness beyond. Along the way, he encounters river bandits, slave catchers, Indians, and every manner of nefarious villain. He also hones his lovemaking skills under the tutelage of a number of beautiful and pliable rustic sirens. At the close, a mature, manly Titus, still seeking an edenic land free from civilized corruptions, is ready at last to enter the world of Johnston's trilogy. The story, howeverwhile sound, meticulously researched, historically accuratehas been almost as impenetrable as Titus's wilderness. It wants an editor. Redundancies and digressionspages of detail on everything from husbandry to woodcraft to how to hold a gunaccount for nearly a third of the length. Meanwhile, the narrative voice shifts unaccountably from formal prose to hokey frontier dialect; the point of view is inconsistent; and minor characters are marked by a stultifying sameness. Bursts of brilliant realism occasionally enliven the prose, but, overall, Johnston's latest sags under its own weightand never matches the quality of the trilogy it precedes.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-553-09071-2
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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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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BOOK TO SCREEN
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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