A captivating true tale that makes even the most intricate con-artist movies look cartoonish.
An astonishing story of decades of deception by a slithery English academic and cleric.
It was during his research for his 2010 biography of noted English scholar Hugh Trevor-Roper that Sisman (John le Carré, 2015, etc.) came across a dossier that Trevor-Roper had assembled on Robert Parkin Peters (born in 1918 as Robert Michael Parkins), who, from young manhood on, tried (and sometimes succeeded—though never for very long) to establish himself as an academic scholar and theologian. He had in fact been ordained, and he had obtained some degrees, but never the weighty ones he claimed at various times to have earned. He also married multiple times (at least seven), was imprisoned for bigamy and deported from the United States and Canada, made moves on about every woman who wandered into his orbit, and was exposed as a fraud in newspapers. Somehow, however, he slid along, moving from position to position. He lied, plagiarized, stole, and fled his debts, jumping from country to country. In the era before Google, it sometimes took employers a long time to learn the truth about him and fire him—or defrock him and otherwise attempt to clip his wings, which always grew back very quickly. Peters was a small, nondescript man—the photographs show him looking a little like Mister Peepers—but he was utterly convincing in his various guises. Trevor-Roper’s dossier ended abruptly in 1983 when he was humiliated by the Hitler diaries scandal (he had innocently authenticated the forgeries), and Sisman had to do some diligent digging on his own to unearth the rest of this jaw-dropping tale. The author speculates only modestly about why Peters behaved as he did, but he concludes that he was a classic narcissist. “Studying Peters,” writes Sisman, “is like tracking a particle in a cloud chamber: usually one cannot see the man himself, but only the path he left behind.” The appended chronology is also incredible.
A captivating true tale that makes even the most intricate con-artist movies look cartoonish.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64009-328-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | MODERN | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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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