Detail-dizzying, creaky and sometimes absorbing.
A convoluted detective story regarding the night of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.
What will strike modern readers while spooling through this complex account of the details of employee whereabouts at Ford’s Theatre during the hours leading up to the assassination is how shockingly little security there was and how much everybody in the company had to drink. Maryland-based theater director, teacher and author Bogar (American Presidents Attend the Theatre: The Playgoing Experiences of Each Chief Executive, 2006, etc.) displays enormous knowledge of theater craft and players’ repertoire, such as that by featured actors Laura Keene and her company starring in Our American Cousin on that particular night, a corny comedy that was a great favorite of Lincoln’s. John Ford, owner and manager of the theater, had several theaters in the works, in Richmond, Baltimore and Philadelphia, and was known for his antipathy to the Union as well as his showcasing of promising talent John Wilkes Booth in numerous classical roles (Booth’s pro-Union brother Edwin avoided playing at Ford’s). Not only was the theater suspected as a “hotbed of spies and seditious plots,” but Booth was allowed free range of the place, picking up his mail, loafing about during performances and between stints at neighboring bars. On this Good Friday, the president’s party was to include Mrs. Lincoln and General and Mrs. Grant (although the Grants ended up not attending), throwing the theater into a tizzy of excitement and preparation—e.g., procuring furniture for the presidential box and selecting special music. Bogar painstakingly rehearses each and every actor, manager or stagehand, many of whom knew Booth well, for a run-through of the horrendous shooting and escape and delineates how individual versions varied hugely and would determine important legal consequences in a court of law.
Detail-dizzying, creaky and sometimes absorbing.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62157-083-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Regnery History
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
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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