A somber consideration of a broken region that saves the scolding for its leaders instead of its residents.
A former eastern Kentucky journalist clarifies (and debunks) some well-worn tropes about Appalachia.
From 2000 to 2005, Maimon was a Pulitzer-finalist correspondent for the Louisville Courier-Journal, which gave him a front-row seat to the accelerating decline in and around the hamlet of Hazard, Kentucky. The opiate crisis, stoked by rampant and unregulated “pill mills,” was expanding, and the coal industry that supported much of the region was in rapid decline. The author contextualizes those dual catastrophes around a place that has been historically deeply poor and plagued by leadership that has been either corrupt or dismissive of long-term, systemic improvements. “Almost every topic I wrote about in Eastern Kentucky connected back to economic marginalization in some way,” he writes. Much of the book focuses on stories he covered during his stint at the paper—e.g., the murders of two candidates for sheriff in 2002 and the case of lawyer Eric Conn, who was convicted of hundreds of millions of dollars in Social Security fraud for helping residents get benefits for “bad nerves.” (The resulting crackdown led to a rash of suicides, only exacerbating the problem.) But Maimon also brings the story up to date. He underscores the hollowness of Trump’s promises to bring back coal jobs and how much partisan politics have stymied halting efforts at progress. Maimon writes with a journalist’s clarity and plainspokenness; he’s an outsider but never condescending, and he’s accepting that some of the truisms about the region are indeed true. He closes on a skeptical note: Open-minded leaders still have a hard time getting traction there, and Trumpism has set its claws, a mindset exemplified by a popular wrestler called the Progressive Liberal, who attracts jeers when he hits the stage talking about the Green New Deal.
A somber consideration of a broken region that saves the scolding for its leaders instead of its residents.Pub Date: June 8, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-61219-885-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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