The accessible, sometimes resonant final chapter in a postwar trilogy of memoirs. Ehrhart's (Passing Time, not reviewed) subject is the contradictions of justice. In 1974, during the last days of Richard Nixon's tainted presidency, the author was ``busted'' several times for far lesser crimes than the president was accused of. The book opens with Ehrhart bounced off his merchant marine ship for possession of marijuana. This first scene introduces a recurrent device: visits from his dead combat buddies, a kind of Greek chorus on American hypocrisy. Sometimes this nonfictional magical realism seems heavy-handed; at other times it works better. As Ehrhart's narrative proceeds, he reflects on the evils in Vietnam, his postwar embrace of the antiwar movement, and his conflict with his straitlaced Pennsylvania parents. His writing canters along, fueled by dialogue, with occasional arresting images: ``The war I wanted to leave behind was stuck in my throat like a stick sharpened at both ends.'' He recounts a bust by New York City cops suspecting him of armed robbery as well as one by New Jersey police looking for Puerto Rican terrorists, but the book's spine is a series of hearings before the Coast Guard on the drug charges. Ehrhart means to comment on the ironies of legal and procedural technicalities— he eventually went free, though he had broken the law—but he excerpts too much trial transcript for such a brief book. Nixon was pardoned, Ehrhart notes. ``At least I had faced my accusers. I had never lied about what I had done or why.'' At the end of the book, his Greek chorus suggests that American power brokers are going to lie about Vietnam, ``turn the whole thing upside down and inside out,'' and urges Ehrhart to tell the truth. This has its illuminating moments, but for those familiar with Vietnam literature, there's not much new or arresting.
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-87023-955-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995
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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