Serial dispatches from the field, about as straightforward and interesting as the line itself.
Reader’s Digest staffer Ecenbarger walks the Mason-Dixon line from its start at Fenwick Island to its end in Brown’s Hill, Pennsylvania.
Ecenbarger weaves historical narrative with a look at the state of race relations along the line, going from location to location and meeting the individuals who live in the vicinity—telling the history of the places, and providing clichéd views of the North and South as an added bonus. The author begins his travels by setting the stage for Mason and Dixon’s journey—which was, in fact, a mission to settle the boundary between the Quaker Pennsylvania of the Penns and the Catholic Maryland of the Calverts in the American colonies of the 18th century. From there, he jumps to the present and finds the first of Mason and Dixon’s markers among present-day detritus of an interstate highway. He then jumps along the line further, and then again further still, following the line all along it route from Point A to Point B. The author’s jump from place to place creates little in the way of narrative—his story reads about as coherently as the journal of Charles Mason, which he quotes liberally from throughout—and he reveals little of his own character in the process of walking the 365 miles. While Ecenbarger tells of scores of incidents of racial injustice along the line over the past 300 years, there is no reason to believe that these have anything to do with the existence of the line itself (save the importance of getting runaway slaves over the border once Pennsylvania abolished slavery in 1808) and while many of these incidents have never been described before, they are not very different in kind or degree from other accounts (segregation, lynchings, etc.) we have heard many times before.
Serial dispatches from the field, about as straightforward and interesting as the line itself.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-87131-910-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
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 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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