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AN ISLAND OUT OF TIME

A MEMOIR OF SMITH ISLAND IN THE CHESAPEAKE

A lush, intimate portrait of Smith Island, Chesapeake Bay, from Horton (Bay Country, 1987, etc.). With his wife and two children, Horton moved to the hamlet of Tylerton—population a little less than 100—on Smith Island in 1987. He was there to teach environmental education classes to schoolchildren, but he was really on a quest to plumb the spirit of the place, one that ``does not shout its virtues, but yields them only to probing and observation.'' Smith Island is classic Chesapeake material, its citizens harvesting the savory blue crab the bay surrenders in hundreds of millions of pounds each year. But the crab industry offers diminishing returns and is going the way of the now-defunct shad and rockfish fisheries, the towns on the island slowly dying. Horton gets to know the fisherfolk, people who understand ``the invisible, subaqueous Chesapeake . . . as well as a farmer knows the contours of his homeplace,'' maintain the last fleet of working sailcraft (Maryland law requires that only boats under sail dredge for oysters), and stalk terrapin in the off-season. These characters, some of them near-mythic in Smith Island lore, offer Horton the pearls of their experience (there are long swaths of first-person, Islander narrative), and he gorges on them: how the winds and tides move the blue crab about, where the terrapin hide, why the oyster beds have gone flat, how the island population manages. Gratifyingly, the island women get equal air time: describing the quicksilver art of picking crabmeat, the not-so-quicksilver art of giving birth aboard a storm-tossed vessel, how they shape both family life and community from impossibly rough circumstance. Horton is everywhere: taking the island doctor's testimony; marvelling at the island artist's tale; attentive to micro-dialects, sacred groves; tracking the seasons' shifts. ``There is a beauty and eloquence to their lives,'' says an off-island resident. The same could be said of this book. (Author tour)

Pub Date: June 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-393-03938-2

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1996

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI

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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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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